Ramps Are Beautiful; Ableism is Not

Horrible people in Chicago attempt to use zoning rules to stop parents trying to build a ramp for their disabled child. Their reason - ramps are too ugly.

Steve Weiss, president of the Old Town Triangle Association, wrote a letter to Ald. Michele Smith (43rd), detailing his objections to the project.

“I understand that the people who purchased the house have a child that requires special needs,” he wrote. “What I don’t understand is why they chose to buy a house in a Landmark Zone when you have these needs. I don’t mean to be heartless or uncaring but this is not the neighborhood for that. Here you conform to the rules, not the other way around.”

The garage would ruin one of the most beautiful, and historic, lines of Victorian homes in Chicago, and the family knew they would be subject to the landmark district’s rules, he wrote.

“Now I’m feeling bad like they are shaming us because we are not willing to allow them this garage which they need for their child,” Weiss wrote. “They should have put their child’s needs first and moved to a neighborhood more conducive to her needs.”

Disabled people, according to Weiss, aren't allowed in historic districts.  Weiss, the worst person in Chicago (on this day) had more to say. From the article:

Weiss went on to write if the zoning board approved the plans for the renovation, he would soon follow with construction plans of his own. It’s a slippery slope when you start allowing homeowners to make certain renovations within historic districts, he argued.

“Do not approve this request to have a garage built,” he wrote. “If you do, I will have my lawyers contact you immediately about building my garage and my friends across the street will do the same. Then we’re like Wells Street and no longer a historic district. It’s game over for preservation!!!”

Well that's a charmer.

SF Disability Rights Advocates Sues Uber

In San Francisco, Disability Rights Advocates is suing Uber. Report from SF Examiner:

Although Uber has a wheelchair-accessible service, called Uber WAV, in the Bay Area, Disability Rights Advocates wrote in the complaint that the service is “a sham.”

The group conducted a test of the service and found that in Alameda County, not a single wheelchair-accessible Uber was available during a total of 120 tests, according to the complaint.

In more than 60 tests the group conducted in San Francisco, a wheelchair-accessible Uber was completely unavailable almost five times out of six. In the rare instance where a WAV was available, the average wait time was about five times longer than the wait for an UberX at the same location.

I wrote for Newsweek on both these types of lawsuits and the broader frame. Regulation is good. Regulation protects rights. Business models that make models by dodging regulations will inevitably harm disabled folks. I wrote:

From Uber to AirBNB to TaskRabbit, the gig economy presents itself as the hyper-flexible way to work, to get things done, and to find the professional services you need. Through promoting “sharing,” using other people’s property like cars and apartments or services like driving, repair skills, these companies have created broadly profitable industries that successfully dodge decades of red tape and other bureaucratic roadblocks.

Over the last three decades and more, access to public space and public infrastructure has been a major goal – and victory – for the disability rights movement. Thanks to numerous state and federal laws, all government services – from trains and buses to court documents and DMVs – must be made accessible. Private businesses, at least once they get to a certain size, have to provide access to their product. A restaurant needs accessible seating. A hotel needs accessible entrances and rooms. Taxis need put some WAVs on the road.

More to come on this suit and the disability issues related to the "gig economy."

Texting 911

St. Paul finally has implemented the ability to text 911. The disability accessibility implications here are enormous, of course, but like most systems that improve accessibility, everyone will benefit. One example, people in a dangerous domestic situation who can't make a phone call, but who need to call for help.

There Ain't No Normal: Hamilton and Headphones

I wrote about my son's bright green hearing protectors for Pacific Standard. I hesitated to get them at first, badly swayed by the idea that they would more firmly mark him as different and cause isolation.

They do the opposite. They open up the world. Including Hamilton.

Here's the takeaway:

I'm not alone. I know far too many people with disabilities, family members of people with disabilities, and other caregivers who hesitate to meet access needs if doing so involves revealing disability. Hearing aids are expensive because they try to be invisible while containing complex electronics. Some of the most interesting new hearing amplifiers are highly visible, giving the makers more room to embed computers to process sound.

On Twitter, AbbyLeigh C., a 23-year-old woman with Crohn's disease and multiple forms of arthritis, wrote at length about her reluctance to use a wheelchair when in college. She exhausted herself walking, trying not to "give up" by using a chair, and eventually took a medical leave from school. Now working on her last few credits, she says, "Once I stopped hurting myself by pushing myself, and accepted having to use the wheelchair, and got out of bed—I started to get less sick." She told me over direct message that her wheelchair allowed her to get back out into the world, which "was a crucial moment for me getting back to feeling like a real person."

My son's needs are specific, but they are neither special nor abnormal. Whenever any of us encounter disability, we must stop letting our sense of the "normal" shape the choices we make either for ourselves or for others. Best of all, my concerns about people staring at his headphones were completely unfounded. Everyone was too happy watching him dance.

READ THE WHOLE THING!

Accommodation fails for Deaf Faculty from A to Z

From the blog Possibilities and Finger Snaps, stories of inclusion fail, mostly around interpreting.

a) Ask the deaf academic if she is willing to write a grant to cover the cost of her interpreters or CART captioning.
b) Return the deaf academic’s conference registration fees, telling her that she cannot come to your conference because her interpreters are too expensive.
c) Tell the deaf academic that she is welcome to attend and bring her own interpreters/CART captioning, and you won’t charge them registration fees (but she’ll have to pay for their services).
d) Tell the deaf academic that she is welcome to attend and bring her own interpreters/CART captioning, and you will only charge them half-cost registration fees (but she’ll have to pay for their services).

Two more:

o) Pay for the colloquium interpreting, but deny the request for the interpreters to interpret the group dinner afterwards. Disinvite the deaf academic from the dinner. Gaslight her by telling her that the dinner invitation was mistakenly made and only meant for members of the department. Look unembarrassed when you are all at a gathering the next day and the other non-department members attending the talk reference the dinner conversation, making it plain that this was not a department-only event, but a hearing people only event.
p) Restrict the deaf academic’s communication access to only the session of the conference that she is presenting, saying that this is all your budget will permit. Tell her she’s welcome to attend the whole conference, nonetheless.

As always, go read the whole post!

I wrote about disability and conferences here and on accommodations in academia generally here. From the latter, Stephanie Kerschbaum, a Deaf academic, told me something important about money and accommodation:

Stephanie Kerschbaum, associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, describes herself as “profoundly deaf.” She wrote me: “I wear behind-the-ear hearing aids and depend on speech reading to understand spoken discourse. While I can understand one-on-one speech fairly well, it is nearly impossible to speech-read individuals in a sea of faces, whether in a classroom or any professional context. For that reason, I work with sign language interpreters.” When she teaches, she speaks orally, but relies on her interpreter to convey student responses.

Of course, a professor’s duties extend beyond the classroom, so the university provides an interpreter — or an appropriate alternative, such as real-time captioning — at committee meetings, at panels and lectures on campus, and in other contexts. “One principle that has been important is that the accommodations be paid for from a central source,” she said. “That is, departments should not be individually responsible for faculty accommodation, because this provides an obvious disincentive for hiring.”

That last is the key thing when it comes to internal accommodations - costs have to be central, not department specific. And they need to cover all the things faculty do, including going to dinner after a talk.

More on Accessible Conferences: Pryal and "Reading Aloud"

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, one of my favorite writers on hidden disabilities, has produced some awesome work lately on accessibility. She was one of many people to write about the lack of disability content at the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, producing fabulous pieces about the nature of accessibility. Now she's got a new piece for Vitae on academic conferences and accessibility for people with psychiatric disabilities.

Conferences are these oddly performative spaces where our work, in my field anyway, lingers in the gaps between ephemeral workshops and permanent peer reviewed scholarship. It's vetted, but not really reviewed, and performed and critiqued on performance, even as in theory it's all about the ideas rather than style. They can be hotbeds of prestige culture, gossip and critiques. I think they are very important, too, especially for small-time scholars isolated from their scholarly peers.

Pryal's column is filled with important insights, but here's the one I want to highlight today. She writes:

No more shaming for reading papers aloud. This is a pet peeve of mine. Many speakers at conferences get slammed either in private (by gossips) or on social media (by what I would consider trolls) for reading their conference papers out loud on a panel.

Now, some presenters read their papers because they lack audience awareness. They read fast to cram in all of their oh-so-important ideas, or they read the paper because they just didn’t prepare well. I’m not talking about these people right now.

I’m talking about another group of presenters — the ones who read their conference papers because they have to. Many of these people read their papers in a captivating manner. They have fabulous audience awareness. But they still read.

I am in this group of readers. We read because reading, itself, is an accessibility measure for us— for a whole host of individual reasons such as anxiety or disfluency.We read because doing so makes our participation at a conference possible. It’s makes the conference accessible.

Don’t shame presenters who read their papers. Don’t tweet snarky comments with the conference hashtag, e.g., “Ugh stop reading papers already! #conference2016.” First of all, we see those tweets. Second of all, you just might be attacking someone who reads because she doesn’t have a choice.

I am a performer, most at my ease in front of a full room with a lightly scripted text, at most, from which to deliver (or hidden in my study with the blinds drawn. It's a balance of extremes). But that performance is not the why of a conference paper.

We build accessibility into our gatherings through policies, many of which Pryal details here (I offered some others in this piece I wrote for Vitae, based on interviewing a large number of scholars who identify as disabled).

But we also built accessibility by shifting our perceptions and embracing a culture that values neurodiversity, including diversity of paper delivery styles.

Finally, to Pryal's point about conference tweeting, I'm total agreement. Tweeting shifts the temporary to the permanent, so my first rule is: Tweeter, do no harm.

Accessible Conferences - A good set of guidelines

Nice post here on Accessible Conferences. Highlights:

Incorporating accessibility into conference organizing must begin at the earliest stages of conference planning, not least of all to ensure that accessibility is a central item in funding applications. Thus, you will notice that even our CFP for the conference provided a sketch of the accessibility provisions for the conference.

And:

Note that there are guidelines for both presenters and for moderators. If there are any concerns that arise during conference events, please let the moderator know. Moderators will be asked to help facilitate accessibility during sessions. You may ask the moderator for assistance before, during, or after your talk. If needed they will be in touch with Jane Dryden (local conference organizer) or a designated student volunteer.

It's everyone's work to be accessible as possible. I now routinely describe my powerpoint slides with sufficient detail that a person with vision issues will have a sense of what I'm talking about. I use a microphone even if I feel I can project. And I try to say that explicitly to tell the audience this is what I'm doing and why, as a way to help spread the culture of accessibility.

For the guidelines themselves, which are solid, please click through to the original link!

 

Adventures in Universal Design: That Viral Picture of Ramps set in Stairs

Many of my friends on Facebook and elsewhere kindly sent me a cool picture of a ramp that zig-zags through a set of stairs. As the picture permeated Facebook, though, I noted an important phenomenon - every single one of my wheelchair-using friends reacted negatively. 

Description: A set of stairs with a ramp moving diagonally through the middle.
If you need this image description, this stairs/ramp would be very difficult for you.

Thanks to a number of my friends in the disability world, I saw this great essay on "the problem with ramps blended into stairs" from Nicolas Steenhout, an expert on accessibility (and a wheelchair user).

The ramp in question is in Vancouver:

The first set of stairs/ramp is at Robson Square in Vancouver, BC. It is a design I’ve used in the past to illustrate potential failures of Universal Design...

WHO IS AFFECTED?

Wheelchair users
People using canes or crutches
People with low vision
People who are blind
People who are distracted
Parents with prams
People on skates/bikes/etc

PROBLEMS WITH THIS DESIGN

STEP COLOURS
It is very difficult to distinguish where one step ends and the other begins. If you have less than perfect vision, this could quickly become dangerous. There are no contrasting strips to signify the edge of the step...
HANDRAILS
There are very few handrails. It is good that there are some, but more handrails would be better. If you are able to walk, but unsteady on your feet, you have to either walk to one end of the stairs, or the other to find handrails....
NO FLAT LANDING
UNEVEN HEIGHT OF RISERS
STEEP RAMP
It’s difficult to tell from photos exactly how steep the ramp is...The point is here that a steep slope requires quite a bit of strength to go up. And a good amount of control to go down. This is true of wheelchair users in manual wheelchairs, of people using canes or crutches, but also of parents pushing prams, or kids on skates.

The whole post is a great example of the challenges of effective universal design.

To me the lesson is this - before investing lots of money building some cool universal design installation, you'd better talk to actual disabled people, and let them test it. The fact that every wheelchair user I know, at a glance, could see the problems with that ramp/stairs is telling.

Former First Lady of Virginia: Disabled people can enter through the basement.

Roxane Gilmore, former first lady of Virginia, believes that disabled people should enter the governor's mansion through the basement, for "aesthetic" reasons.

A plan to build a wheelchair ramp at the Virginia Executive Mansion is turning into a tussle between old and new Richmond, with Gov. Terry McAuliffe saying the alteration will create a more dignified entrance for disabled guests and a former first lady raising alarm that the ramp needlessly threatens the historic character of the 200-year-old mansion.

The governor and first lady Dorothy McAuliffe announced the ramp project last month, calling it an improvement on the mansion’s existing method of wheelchair access: an elevator from the basement.

In response, Roxane Gilmore, the wife of former governor and current Republican presidential candidate Jim Gilmore, has circulated a letter among historic preservationists in which she characterizes the ramp as unnecessarily intrusive on the nation’s oldest continuously occupied governor’s residence. Several docents, the guides who lead mansion tours, were taken aback when the ramp plan was announced.

“A lot of us are Richmond natives,” said Betty Markham, a docent for 25 years who, like many of the guides, is a retired teacher affiliated with a women’s club. “And we just don’t want to see it defaced.”

For Markham, accessibility is "defaced." Meanwhile, Gilmore believes that an elevator from the basement is equal access. I was also struck by this further quote from Markham:

“We just don’t understand the need for it. It’s just a real unattractive thing for the mansion,” said Markham. “You don’t see this at Mount Vernon, the White House, Williamsburg. You don’t see this at other historical places.”

Maybe you should? You do at the White House. What if Virginia has a disabled governor some day, would they have to enter their house from the basement? Undoubtedly, that possibility has never occurred to Gilmore or Markham.

As Gilmore herself says, "It belongs to the people of the commonwealth.” If that's true, than all the people of the commonwealth deserve equal access.

Principle 1: Equality is more important than aesthetics and sight lines.
Principle 2: Someday, inaccessible buildings will both strange and antiquated.
Principle 3: Ramps can be beautiful, sweeping, architectural features. They always make me smile.