Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - access

Improving Disability Access at Film Festivals

Emily Beitiks — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 20:26:51 +0000

By: Superfest Co-Directors Cathy Kudlick and Emily Beitiks

For the last nine years, the Longmore Institute on Disability has led Superfest Disability Film Festival, the longest running festival of its kind. We approach this event that is first and foremost for disabled people as an opportunity to discover and model what cutting-edge access can look like. Whether it involves spaces, the movie-going experience, or the content of films, we work hard to establish an environment where we provide as many accommodations as possible *before* guests have to ask. Three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) went into law, it's high time disabled people should be able to expect to watch a movie without having to make a fuss. Not only that, but various access features benefit far more people than we can ever know.

So what does access look like?

The bad news? Access is messy, complex, creative work. The good news? Access is messy, complex, creative work. Pick a place to start and dive in.

Think of it as an art, rather than a science. Yes, there are some guidelines and even requirements in some instances, but if you approach it as a human enterprise you'll have more leeway and fun, achieving better results in the end.
Use open captioning. We play all our films with open captioning and have never received a complaint that it is distracting. In addition, we have a live captioner to provide access during live speaking events. These features are crucial for people who are hard of hearing or Deaf. But they also benefit non-native speakers as well as anyone who might find reading text an easier way to process information.
In addition, if you're hosting a large public event or if someone requests it, ASL is a must. It is to captioning what hearing someone sing a song is to reading a transcript compiled by a non native speaker of that song. Think of ASL as a dramatic and expressive language. Moreover, having interpreters allows Deaf filmmakers, panelists, and audience members to express themselves.
Make audio description (AD, also called video description) easily available for blind and low vision attendees, who--contrary to public misconceptions--can be big movie fans. By offering a narrated audio track that uses silent moments in the film, AD speaks relevant visual information such as the text of the love note lying on the table or the dead body lying on the sofa. AD is in its infancy and requires subjective skills such as whether to describe race and other physical characteristics. (For helpful information about services and approaches, visit Thomas Reid’s podcast on “Flipping the Switch on Audio Description” or this panel discussion Superfest co-presented on “The Art of Audio Description” with SFFilm.
There are many different strategies for audio description, and it’s important that you explore them and find what’s right for the culture of your festival. Sometimes audio description is offered with headsets, whether a pre-recorded track or provided live by professional audio describers. At our festival, we require all our filmmakers to get their films audio described, a service we provide when filmmakers’ funds are limited. While audio description is crucial for blind visitors, open audio description can create a barrier for people with sensory disabilities who sometimes find it overwhelming and distracting. We alternate screenings with open and closed audio description, providing an alternative screening with the reverse provided.
It's also important to consider how visually accessible your physical program and website are for patrons with vision impairments. While there are some guidelines for best practices that you can find [here], you don't need to settle for an unattractive program. Remember that many people over 40 and most people over 60 will be glad not to have to struggle with tiny grey letters!. For website accessibility, here is a useful checklist of what's required by Web Content Accessibility Guide (WCAG) standards.
Making a film festival accessible often means ruling out more traditional venues. Even a “wheelchair accessible” theater may only have two spaces available for wheelchair riders, far from able to accommodate an audience such as ours where we typically welcome around 25 wheelchair and mobility device users. We seek out flat auditoriums without bolted seating so we can provide many different wheelchair seating options. This allows wheelchair riders to sit where they want with friends who may or may not be wheelchair users. (Before you object by saying you've never seen more than one or two wheelchair users at a movie theater, consider why this might be so!) Lastly, make sure that as you scope out your venue, you consider that the stage is accessible--how heartbreaking to be a filmmaker who can't speak to the audience or collect an award!
A nonstandard venue also makes it easier to accommodate patrons who can't spend hours seated in the confined chairs of most theaters. We provide some bench seating for patrons of all sizes to make sure we have seats that don’t assume a certain body type. Our bean bag chairs have been a godsend for people with chronic pain or who need to stretch out and lay horizontal for the many hours of a film festival.
As more patrons deal with multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), it's important to work with a venue to adjust their cleaning policy. We bring our own scent-free soap, ask our venues to use them for the week leading up to the event, and remind patrons not to wear scented products to the festival. We also provide a seating section for people with chemical sensitivity set apart from the main crowd, just in case our warnings not to wear scented products get disregarded. Conversations around MCS are still relatively new, so what seems novel today, may be standard soon - just think about how hard it was once for many venues to imagine restricting cigarette smoking!
Where possible, try to carve out somewhere people can go to get away from the crowd, such as a separate quiet area. This especially benefits neurodiverse people, but also anyone who needs a place to unwind after an intense film. Just make sure that signage indicates how the room is to be used--no, this is not a place for you to call your old friend and catch up.
Think of compliance with the law as doing the bare minimum rather than your ultimate goal. The mood you set on your website says a lot to your patrons with disabilities. If you settle for the standard language of “reasonable accommodations,” people won't feel welcome at all. Why not a more inviting statement like, “We welcome the opportunity to make our festival accessible to all patrons. If you need an accommodation, please reach out to...” and provide a specific name/contact info if possible. List all accessibility features clearly on your website so your guests don’t have to dig deep to know if they can attend or not.
Now that you know how to do it, keep offering some form of digital access for your festival! We heard from many disabled people that COVID made the world accessible in ways it never had been before. Even a highly accessible festival like Superfest has people unable to attend because their disabilities prevent them from getting out of bed and/or because they live halfway around the world. For tips on hosting accessible online zoom events, you can check out this guide we put together, “Ensuring Access in the Time of COVID-19.” Especially if you’re already committed to inaccessible venues, online access is a decent short-term strategy for increasing inclusion.
Making mistakes goes with the territory, and that's ok! If patrons know you're working with them and are transparent about your efforts, about what you can (and can't) offer, they'll be on your side. And rather than take you to court as bad ADA publicity wrongly implies, they will likely have suggestions for workarounds. If you don't have all the answers, say so. If you don't have every access feature worked out, say so. When in doubt, apologize thoughtfully. FWIW, nearly everything we now know about the nitty gritty details in access came from making mistakes and learning from patient attendees who told us exactly where things weren't working. These are opportunities for growth and learning, not a reason to throw in the towel. It's a process that means being in for the long haul.
Inclusion of disabled people also entails support for the multiple identities that disabled people hold. For example, a festival that has accessible bathrooms for cisgendered people, but does not have an option for a transgendered person has not yet offered access. Because many disabled people live in poverty, we offer pay-what-you-can tickets to ensure that no one is turned away from lack of funds. The Queer Women of Color Film Festival is a leader in thinking through the intersections of festival access, check them out as a resource!

You might not be able to achieve top notch access overnight, but start somewhere and make a plan to grow from there. Developing access is fun, creative work that will expand your audience and offer unintended benefits for everyone. Enjoy the journey!

For more support and access consulting, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Pklinst@sfsu.edu

*Photo by Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash

Tags:

access

ADA

Beyond Compliance

Film Festivals

An Open Letter to the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Emily Beitiks — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 16:06:13 +0000

To Lori Starr, Executive Director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum,

We are writing to express our dismay to learn of the blow you’ve dealt to Bay Area disability arts and culture with your recent layoff of Cecile Puretz, CJM’s Access and Community Engagement Manager. While we are fully aware of the challenging economic situation the Contemporary Jewish Museum now faces, we also note that recent communications stated your institution’s support for disability on the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. To share such messaging after dismissing the person solely responsible for promoting access at the CJM gives a misleading impression to a community just being won over. You must understand that Cecile Puretz built a powerful, innovative set of practices and partnerships that has shaped the practices of museums locally and nationally.

During her 10+ years at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Cecile was a dedicated and passionate advocate for the Bay Area’s disability community, with extra attention paid to those most marginalized within this group. Most prominently, she fought to get Superfest Disability Film Festival an annual home at the CJM, which, by many accounts brought a different kind of social justice prestige to the museum. The internal staff training on disability that ensured physical and cultural openness to a new clientele and features for your older patrons (many seasoned donors) set a standard that is being copied by other museums.

A crisis such as the one every institution now faces provides opportunities for new ways of doing things. Eliminating a position and laying off an employee who has done so much to change perceptions of museums in general and make accessible the programs and spaces of the CJM to the broader public suggests limited imagination.

While we have the utmost confidence that Cecile will bounce back from this heartbreaking blow, we are concerned for the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Bay Area disability community. We hope that you have put into place a management structure that can continue to improve access as effectively as Cecile previously did, and when the economic situation changes, we hope you will prioritize hiring people with disabilities to bring more disability expertise into the museum. We hope that this letter urges you to realize that you have let your disabled constituents and their allies down, and we hope that you again find your way to recognize that even in times of economic hardship, access cannot be compromised.

For more, see this panel discussion with Amanda Cachia, a disabled educator, independent curator, and writer and Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project in conversation about museums in the 21st century hosted by Philadelphia Contemporary.

Sincerely,

The Longmore Institute on Disability

The Disability Visibility Project

The Blind Posse

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_0cMvZf5CY&feature=youtu.be

Tags:

access

museums

Americans with Disabilities Act

Disability Visbility Project

Blind Posse

Bringing Better Access to the Global Museum

Emily Beitiks — Mon, 16 Mar 2020 18:25:33 +0000

Thanks to the generous support of donors Stanley Yarnell and Victor Rowley, the Global Museum at SF State now has its first audio description guide for the blind/vision impaired! Director of the Global Museum Paige Bardolph worked with the Longmore Institute to develop this helpful resource. Additional description written by Longmore Student Fellow Maxfield Hunt and recordings by Longmore Fellows Maxfield Hunt and Sam Hengesbach. We hope you enjoy!

To plan your visit to SF State's Global Museum, visit their website.

Click to access the guide without background music and with background music.

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Umeå 2: Automatic Assumptions

Emily Beitiks — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 00:13:22 +0000

By: Catherine Kudlick

Right up there with “handicapped” parking spots, ramps into buildings, and braille in elevators, automatic door openers are the most prominent public symbols of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In case someone happened to forget or never thought about it, every little bar to open a door even has a little wheelchair symbol.

So, when I arrived at Umeå University for my month-long visiting professorship, one of the first things I noticed was that the openers didn’t have little wheelchairs on them. Ok, it’s Sweden, so there’s no ADA. But every door had an automatic opener, and they were just part of daily life. Whether you used a wheelchair or not, you needed them because it was really cold and the doors at the modern university were all ridiculously heavy and when you’re half-frozen, stomping in with boots and thick gloves, you might appreciate being able to tap on an automatic opener.

In other words, the automatic openers weren’t labeled as “special” - they simply opened the door.

Swedish Door Opener

American Door Opener

I was fascinated by the implications. With all the talk of “universal design,” why do we need a wheelchair symbol on automatic door openers? I wondered how many people in the USA either consciously or unconsciously don’t use them because they imply stigma and needing help. Without the label, they’d be door openers for everyone, just like OXO Good Grips kitchen tools and so many other “assistive devices” that started out special and are now mainstream.

Other implications: would having a wheelchair symbol on something mechanical make it more or less likely that it would be repaired if it broke down? I imagine fears of lawsuits and/or a sense of urgency when something with a wheelchair on it needs to be fixed. But then again, when something is understood to be for “just a few of those people,” it might not seem as urgent as it does when everybody depends on something. In other words, when an automatic door opener without a wheelchair symbol on it stopped working, the urgency would be framed as “the door can’t be opened” as opposed to “the automatic door needs to be repaired.”

But then I had this other thought: if all the wheelchair symbols were removed from automatic door openers, maybe people would forget to thank disabled people for making everyone’s world a little better.

Tags:

universal design

access

Sweden

Disability Accommodations

automatic doors

Access is in the Air

Visitor — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 23:44:47 +0000

By: Catherine Kudlick

Like the whiff of California's early spring blossoms, access for blind people is in the air. After last fall's red carpet launch, we have exciting news of Pixar's audio description for all Disney films; thanks to an app, blind people can now follow mainstream releases with along with everyone else.

Last month also brought Stevie Wonder's viral video taunting his colleagues at the Grammys about not reading Braille. More awesome still was his plea: "We need to make every single thing accessible to every single person with a disability." This must be the first-ever celebrity call for disabled people's rights on a world stage.

And then there was my heart-stopping moment during Sunday's Oscars when I - along with a number of followers on social media - could have sworn we had heard audio description. Watching with my 88-year-old mother who also benefited, I hooted, I tweeted, I bolted from my chair to dance a little jig: they're describing the visual content of movies, not just on national TV, but on the premier movie show. Our hopes were soon dashed as normal life returned - the descriptions had been used to showcase the fine art of script writing for the best screenplay award.

Yet something in my universe had turned upside down. Because of Pixar and Stevie Wonder, it was possible not just to dream of audio description as a possibility but to imagine it, even feel it as something real.

The work of accessibility is just beginning. Some needs are quite basic: a quarter century after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), audio description for movies, plays and other performance is far less common than close captioning for deaf and hard of hearing, to the point where even my mother conflated them in her head.

And despite the passage of the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act too much of the Internet remains off-limits to blind and low-vision users, while the new world of phone apps is hit or miss. Sometimes newly designed environments even get worse with more animation and smaller, greyer fonts. Many blind people I know avoid thinking of how fragile our tech ecosystem is; one seemingly innocuous update could end it in an instant.

This is why we must build upon the interventions of giants like Pixar and Stevie Wonder to push for access on every front. Access needs to be so woven into the everyday fabric of everything that it would be unthinkable to imagine a world without it. Consider how unthinkable it would be to undo all the curb cut-outs for wheelchairs and apply this to the electronic environment.

HOW YOU CAN HELP!

If you're a scholar, consider joining the accessible books initiative. If you're not, spread the word about accessible film options for blind people and older people who love movies but who may have stopped going because of missing out. If your local theater offers nothing, ask them why, and casually mention that it's increasingly part of the law.
And if you have any pull in the tech or film worlds, share the news: exciting creative possibilities for access are already here. Pages that build in access need not be clunky or ugly. At the Superfest: International Disability Film Festival that we co-host with SF LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, some of the most interesting film breakthroughs are thanks to directors building this feature in for everyone. And Longmore Lecturer Joshua Miele's Video Description Research and Development Center project crowd-sources audio description.

Sure, my Oscar hopes were dashed this year, but I saw a future that spoke to me in a clear voice: access is in the air and worth everyone's time.

Tags:

LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired

Pixar

Stevie Wonder

Superfest: International Disability Film Festival

Uncategorized

The Americans with Disabilities Act: Nowhere to Go but Up for Local Fox News

Visitor — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:43:48 +0000

Recently, the Longmore Institute was contacted by KTVU, our local Fox affiliate, about how a “SF firehouse gets costly ADA compliant makeover” to the tune of approximately $400,000. What is it with all the cheap shots at the expensive ADA? It’s incredible how the media is filled with stories of the outrageous and the egregious – the $1000 grab bar ripped out for being an inch too low, the small business forced to close its doors because of having to redo its counter or seating area. Sure, one can always find the most extreme and costly transgressions that hitch a ride along with anything big-ticket and far-reaching, be it the recent scandals over the Bay Bridge bolts, the bloated costs of California’s High Speed Rail, or – for that matter – big banks’ behavior since new finance laws went into effect in recent decades.

But the root of the resentment at the ADA suggests something more profound, a simmering sense that when it comes to disability, it’s somehow wrong to fix the environment rather than the person. Where are the stories of disabled people really benefitting from the ADA to go to school, be able to work, eat in restaurants, ride public transportation, and who now, thanks to access contribute to the US economy as innovators and taxpayers? Where are the stories of able-bodied people who benefit from this same law every time they follow a sports event thanks to closed captioning in a noisy bar or effortlessly push a stroller over the curb? And where are the stories that explore links between these curb cuts and the construction jobs they created or the great increase in product development and sales of rolling suitcases and other urban devices with wheels?

According to the Fox news story the Alleycats of Fire Station #1 south of Folsom Street couldn’t discern any advantages either, having been left “shaking their heads” after moving into their new $12-million facility. The controversial renovations included three ADA-accessible restrooms on the second floor “where the general public is not allowed to go,” features that “won’t even benefit injured fire-fighters who aren’t allowed in the station.” To reach these accessible facilities, they needed to install an especially roomy ADA-compliant elevator. The camera pans over extra-large lockers with wheelchair symbols on them and shows footage from upstairs, “where hallways are wide and for wheelchairs.” The story ends with a lingering shot of a toilet as it mentions “advocates for the disabled at San Francisco’s Longmore Institute on Disability [who] state that ADA compliant features also help able-bodied people, and say it’s better to make space universally accessible now than have to upgrade in the future.”

The reporter, David Stevenson, got our message right. But were we made to seem ridiculous as my Dad later claimed?

I struggled with his reprimand. I’d been pleased that our message came through unaltered, figuring that even if the not-so-subtle association between us and a toilet said one thing, surely our enlightening words prompted some viewers to think differently. But here was my 87 year-old father, one of my most vocal advocates, finding this as yet another case of Fox News and the right-wing media skewing stories at his daughter’s expense. His visceral reaction to the segment’s using the Longmore Institute to show disability advocacy at its most extreme suggested that our case for finding unintended benefits for everyone in disability accommodations remains completely foreign. Even though our message wasn’t taken out of context and was presented on its own terms, the report on Fox appeared to confirm the outrageousness of our stance and with it, our naïveté.

As with any news story, our message got distilled down to a shadow of its bare essence from a much longer interview. David Stevenson seemed genuinely open to our examples, not in a preparing for a “gotcha!” but in a “whoa, never thought of that!” way. Assistant director Emily Beitiks described the ADA’s gifts to her when she was pregnant, which she blogged about on “Disability Remix” several weeks ago. I invoked the history of curb cuts in the early 1970s, which most city officials initially decried for similar reasons to those concerning the firehouse renovations; for such huge costs, few would use them. An official in Berkeley, home of one of the first curb cuts, allegedly argued that they were useless because one never saw disabled people in wheelchairs on the streets.

Such chicken-or-egg reasoning suggests profound ambivalence about the places people with disabilities should and shouldn’t occupy in US society. The ADA has brought us out in larger numbers with greater expectations and louder demands. People with disabilities have crossed a threshold that is simultaneously visible and invisible, a transgression that leaves some – disabled and nondisabled – uncomfortable without realizing it or knowing why.

The Fox story touched on this by opening with the hook that these were “renovations for those who might never become firefighters.” True enough, at least for those on active duty. But who wouldn’t appreciate more space in a locker and locker room, airy hallways (probably meeting basic safety standards as much as ADA ones), and an elevator that not only had made moving in easier but that might one day hoist a giant fridge, water heater, or any number of awkward-to-transport, costly objects useful in a fire station, from the hefty to the fragile? Possibly these accommodations reminded these brave men and women of their own vulnerability, as if enjoying the same benefits as “the handicapped” would be tantamount to being one of them.

Often, disability reveals how all of us come with largely unexamined preconceptions about the world around us, to the point that we sometimes miss some obvious questions. In the case of KTVU and Fire Station #1: if they expected public visitors on the ground floor, wasn’t it surprising that the architect hadn’t planned for an accessible toilet downstairs? Surely the hardworking staff servicing the trucks and preparing to race out to fight fires would have found it a godsend. And what about that grateful little wheelchair-riding kid with a full bladder and a love of fire engines visiting the station with classmates?

Link to the news segment here.

Tags:

Americans with Disabilities Act

Planning Accessible Events

Visitor — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:54:05 +0000

By: Emily Smith Beitiks

The Longmore Institute recently hosted a panel and reception honoring the work of Paul K. Longmore (in case you missed it, you can watch the captioned video here). Leading up to the event, my mind was rushing with all the things to keep track of: adequate space for wheelchair riders that doesn't block the path but also doesn't quarantine them to one section of the room; tracking down the comments from all the speakers to give to the captioners; directions and signage that clearly lead attendees to the event, preventing attendees from accidentally ending up in the Westfield mall, the Bermuda triangle of consumerism. Now that we've planned a few events that strive for maximum accessibility, we like to think we're getting the hang of it, but the concern is still always lurking: if we can't put on an accessible event, what right do we have to ask it of other events and organizations?

Much to our delight, nearly eighty people of all shapes and sizes quickly filled the room. In fact, it was so packed that we rushed to put out additional chairs [an accommodation for the leg users who did not bring their own], spilling into the open space we had reserved for the reception.

The panel was deeply emotional, filled with both laughter and sorrow as close friends and colleagues shared their memories of Paul Longmore. While the panelists were speaking, Longmore Institute friend and supporter Corbett O'Toole passed me a note. Since she has already saved us from many unanticipated pitfalls of inaccessibility, I immediately unfolded the note with a sense of foreboding. The note read: "I'm concerned about these chairs in the back. You don't want anything in the way of a crip and their food and wine." Grateful, we whisked away the chairs the moment the panel ended, and whew, our refreshments were accessible for all.

I offer these behind-the-scenes moments for they illustrate an important lesson that often gets neglected when we talk about access for people with disabilities: thinking about access only gets you half way there. To go the rest of the way, you must also think about culture. Many have argued that disabled people have a culture, just like other minority groups (the institute's founder Paul Longmore liked to say that this culture even involves a cuisine: fast food!). Corbett's friendly reminder - this crowd will not be shy about grabbing those hors d’oeurves you're offering, so plan accordingly! - provided yet another example to back this up.

As we continue to push our events to make each one more accessible than the last, may they also be supportive of and contributing to disability culture.

Tags:

Organization of American Historians

Paul K. Longmore

Paul Longmore

Uncategorized

Accessible Presents

Visitor — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:05:47 +0000

By: Catherine J. Kudlick

With this entry I hope to introduce a regular feature for which we’ll gladly accept guest contributions. Our work at the Longmore Institute is devoted to discovering advances in universal design - the idea that innovations put into place to benefit someone with a disability can often have unintended benefits for everyone. We always come back to the curb cut, originally put in to help a few wheelchair riders, but now used by people who walk: parents with strollers, folks with rolling bags, delivery people, and skateboarders, to name a few. There are also television captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing people that help non-native speakers, multi-taskers, and no-doubt others. The screen-reading software first-conceived for blind people helps commuters. Of course not every innovation benefits every user; sometimes they even compete, such as in the early days of curb cuts when blind cane users couldn’t use the curb to make sure they were crossing the street in a straight line. But still, there are many instances where these innovations offer surprising gifts for all. Hence the name: Accessible Presents, my incurable penchant to pun. Get it? To get things started, here is my first contribution.

This week students have returned to campus in droves from near and far. These laughing, sneezing, coughing hordes bring with them a fresh batch of germs: flu, colds, conjunctivitis, mononucleosis…..

Very few cough into their sleeves.

Hundreds of them per hour stream in and out of the Humanities Building, in and out of classrooms, in and out of restrooms where they’re pulling on door knobs, pushing on bars, grabbing a door before it closes.

Thank goodness for the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires automatic doors for hands-free opening and closing!

Tags:

access

accessible design

ADA

Americans with Disabilities Act