Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - ADA

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

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access

ADA

Beyond Compliance

Film Festivals

A Telethon Revival in 2020, Seriously?

Nathan Burns — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 20:42:32 +0000

By: Cathy Kudlick

The Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) will proudly revive its iconic Jerry Lewis Telethon on October 24. Coming in the midst of a pandemic and polarized political climate, the decision is both a brilliant move and a blow to the disabled people who make up 1 in 4 Americans.

Everyone knew of the extravaganzas that dominated American television each Labor Day weekend in the 1960s through early 2000s. A blend of “television” and “marathon,” the variety shows featured cheesy comedy, magic acts, gospel choirs, big name entertainers, and CEOs with household names who joshed with emcees like comedian Jerry Lewis as they celebrated rising donation numbers on giant glistening tote boards.

By many measures, this is a perfect time for a revival. People across America are anxious, depressed, and bored. An opportunity to support scientific work that leads to understanding disease while improving someone’s quality of life seems refreshingly non-partisan and humane. Not only that, but according to MDA, over a half century Jerry Lewis raised over $2 billion for research, equipment like wheelchairs, and life-changing summer camps for kids with disabilities.

So why are many disabled people and our allies worry that the telethon’s revival could do more harm than good?

The simple answer: despite significant gains symbolized by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), these fundraising efforts draw on outdated stereotypes that rob us of dignity, and ultimately of options. The program’s return threatens precarious gains on mainstream TV with shows like “Speechless” and “Glee” starting to chip away at telethon-inspired ideas directly descended from pitiful Tiny Tim and freak shows that displayed human oddities for profit. Because telethons set a stage with stories scripted by the nondisabled, we rarely get to be heroes in stories of our own telling, which leaves us one-dimensional, damaged strangers.

While on the surface the October 24 event may look updated with today’s latest tech, keeping the name and favorably mentioning Lewis (abruptly fired from MDA in 2012) suggests little has changed. We’ll be pleasantly surprised to find evidence of boldly-expressed lessons learned from the disabled people who protested against being used on the shows to inspire pity and who condemned Lewis for his contempt for disability rights; a-political framings of hopelessness and tragedy are hard to shake when it comes to disabled people, especially after decades of repetition in successful fundraising.

Here’s the thing: attitudes like these sneak in unawares, for people with and without disabilities. They’re passed down through generations to media influencers, to presidents and policy makers, to teachers, to doctors, and to potential dates. They surface in too many Hollywood hits where people with disabilities (played by non-disabled actors who unnervingly often win Oscars) are angry, sad, bitter, but “fortunately” choose suicide. They arm the playground bullies and fuel the giddy horror of TikTok’s recent “New Teacher Challenge” where parents shared images of their own children reacting in horror after seeing a photo of someone’s facial disfigurement and told this would be their teacher.

Let’s face it: stories that inspire donors to give money to seek a cure for childhood diseases aren’t the ones that convince those same donors to hire, include, date, or learn more about the person with a disability they’ve just met. Telethons have no incentive to show the resourcefulness people with different disabilities bring to crossing a street, communicating, figuring out a bureaucracy, using technology, cooking a meal, or framing ourselves as competent to someone unaware that they’ve been brainwashed by telethons.

In the spirit of a truly forward-looking telethon that would improve more than a handful of disabled lives, here’s my dream for the October 24 event. It would raise money to undo the afflictions visited upon millions of people with disabilities and our families by fifty years of propaganda. To test my theory that telethons need disabled people more than disabled people need telethons, it would be run by and for people with disabilities — nothing about us without us! It would seek a cure for bullies and shame and prejudice. It would foreground our unique expertise on the fragile points in the healthcare system and government assistance programs. It would educate viewers about how much more rewarding it is to live in solidarity and interdependence than clinging to false dreams of independence. Alongside pain and frustration, it would share the exuberance and joy of the disability community.

If so moved, give to the MDA Telethon on October 24. But don’t be lulled into thinking “mission accomplished.” Pair this with learning more about what disabled people are doing in the arts, politics, and education to make society better, then donate to them too. Fighting for a medical cure is an especially worthy cause in a pandemic. But until that cure arrives, so is supporting dignity, opportunity, and a decent quality of life for every human being.

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“Save Changes”: Telling Stories of Disability Protest (via Nursing Clio blog)

Visitor — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 18:06:21 +0000

This is a cross-post from the Nursing Clio blog originally posted here.

By: Catherine Kudlick

At first, it was a simple case of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” as I worked with WikiEducation Foundation to teach a methods course in which students created disability history content. But the more I learned, the more it became clear that we were engaging in multiple forms of protest, especially once I began working on my own contribution.

My past warnings to students not to rely on content created by the crowd were perhaps a vestige of anxieties that had led authorities to suppress Wikipedia’s precursor, L’Encyclopédie in the decades leading up to the French Revolution. Its impresario, the Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot, had already been imprisoned for challenging established knowledge.

Diderot would have been pleased by Wikipedia’s mission, “to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge,” at the same time that he would recognize its flaws. Most editors are young white men who, consciously or unconsciously, ignore those on the margins. And Wikipedia’s “notability” requirement (“significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject”) inherently favors information from establishment sources. Such rules reinforce existing ideas about which topics merit coverage.

My class faced real challenges. First there’s a daunting set of Wikipedia codes and hierarchies. And I was surprised to discover that even a generation weaned on social media fretted about public feedback from strangers.

Then there was the focus on disability history. A field that began to coalesce around 2000, it seeks to expand thinking about a group that makes up nearly one fifth of the US population today. Unfortunately, a prevailing belief that disability is a static biological condition prevents most from understanding it as something shaped by society and culture much like race, gender, class, and sexual identity. At the beginning of my disability history courses, I tell students that they’re on the cutting edge of history, much like those a generation ago who learned about women’s history and the history of African Americans.

I told this class that they were making history by writing it.

Pointing out that history has a history, I invited them to consider how putting a group in context can combat prejudice and stigma. An entry that tells the story of your people on the world’s seventh most visited website can’t help but catapult you from being an individual struggling alone to being part of something far bigger. With belonging comes a sense of pride, a sense of having something to contribute.

Learning along with my class, I wrote an article on the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building in US history, the “Section 504 protest” in April 1977. Through an exhibit called “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights,” I’d helped bring this little-known disability Stonewall to life. The successful month-long occupation by over one hundred disabled people and their allies would pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

HEW employee Bruce Lee posted a sign, reading “504 is law now make it reality,” in his office supporting Section 504 during the protest. (Photograph by HolLynn D’Lil)

Four years before the protests, congressional staffers had slipped anti-discrimination language from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into a vocational rehabilitation bill that was up for reauthorization. This countered views of “the disabled” as pitiful wards of charity. Rights included making public spaces accessible to people in wheelchairs and mainstream education open to qualified students with disabilities. This “Section 504” applied to nearly all public spaces, including government offices, universities, schools, hospitals, and transportation systems.

Disability activists understood 504 as their bill of rights that still needed one signature from the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in order to be put into effect. Worried about costs, officials from the Nixon, Ford, and the newly-elected Carter administrations had stalled. After four years of trying every legal channel, activists snapped. On April 5, 1977 people with disabilities took to the streets in cities with regional HEW offices. Almost everywhere protests were either cut off or fizzled.

In San Francisco things were different. With little warning, over 100 people streamed into the Federal Building and refused to leave for nearly a month.

504 protesters occupied the HEW offices at 50 United Nations Plaza, making them the headquarters of the “Section 504 Emergency Coalition.” (Photograph by HolLynn D’Lil)

The protests succeeded in part because of the Bay Area’s unique climate. Since the 1960s disabled people had been drawn to the rich mosaic of minorities who challenged the status quo: gay men and lesbians, students, artists, and practitioners of new religions, all that included people with disabilities. Decent weather made it easier to participate in antiwar protests, civil rights demonstrations, and the Free Speech Movement gathering momentum at UC Berkeley. In this electrifying environment disabled individuals came to think of themselves as people with rights, while putting them in touch with potential supporters.

The 504 occupation also succeeded because savvy organizers, including Kitty Cone, Judy Heumann, and others, had spent years cultivating relationships and building coalitions. In addition to galvanizing disabled people themselves, they had educated politicians. Mayor George Moscone helped with portable showers while Congressmen Phil Burton and George Miller had the 4th floor of the federal building declared a temporary “satellite office of congress,” a theatrical stunt that allowed them to hold a public hearing about the protesters’ concerns to garner media attention. City officials allowed hundreds of people to gather each day on Civic Center Plaza below to cheer on the occupiers.

The protest also enjoyed wide support from local community groups. In line with its popular food programs, the Black Panther Party brought in hot meals for all 100+ occupiers, including BPP members Brad Lomax and his attendant Chuck Jackson.

Protesters gathered in front of City Hall in support of the 504 occupiers. (Photograph by HolLynn D’Lil)

And the disabled people inside risked their jobs and even their lives to be there. Amidst office furniture, people from different races, social classes, and with a variety of disabilities and their allies created a makeshift society. Some were seasoned protesters while others had never slept away from home before. Spending so many hours together forged cross-disability coalitions rooted in true interdependence — such as when someone who couldn’t speak could dial a phone so that someone without use of her hands could make a call. Just like in any community, there was bickering and intrigue and romance, but here there was also a sense of purpose and a political awakening.

I teared up as I hit the “save changes” that would make this story public on Wikipedia for the first time, knowing a hard-fought victory was now part of electronic history and of course up for grabs.

But how permanent is it? Even before the November 8 election ushered in an era ever more hostile to minority rights, I sensed something like 504 would now be hard to pull off. Everyone is on guard, literally and figuratively, in a national climate of building walls rather than alliances.

I imagined my students hitting “save changes” buttons of their own. Future activism will likely be about occupying virtual spaces and other tactics we can’t yet imagine. History inspires us and the next generations to take heart that the seemingly most disenfranchised can — in the words of 504’s Kitty Cone — “wage a struggle at the highest levels of power and win.”

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Subversive Access: Disability History Goes Public in the United States

Visitor — Tue, 24 May 2016 18:28:11 +0000

Disability History is taking off in Western Europe, as evidenced by the Public Disability History Blog started in January 2016 that has already surpassed 10,000 visitors. In the guest blog shared below, Catherine Kudlick joins the conversation by introducing the “Patient No More” exhibit.

In summer 2015, the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University mounted an interactive, multi-media exhibit “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights". We faced several daunting challenges that ultimately made our installation like no other. In fact, we have been sharing our process with museum professionals and continue to learn as we go. 1977 disability protests in San Francisco. Photographed by Anthony Tusler

First, the story itself: on April 5, 1977, more than 100 Americans with and without disabilities began a twenty-six day occupation of San Francisco’s Federal Building to insist on getting civil rights. Four years earlier, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 made it illegal for any facilities or programs funded by the national government to discriminate against disabled people. One official’s signature stood in the way of the law taking effect. After four years of waiting, a coalition made up people with different disabilities launched protests across the country. San Francisco’s occupation proved the most involved and successful. In fact, thanks to support from local community groups like the Black Panther Party, Glide Memorial Church, the Gay Men’s Butterfly Brigade, as well as local and national politicians, it remains the longest unarmed take-over of a federal building in US history. The occupation itself and subsequent victory gave birth to a national disability rights movement and helped pave the way for passing Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) thirteen years later in 1990.

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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.

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LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired

Pixar

Stevie Wonder

Superfest: International Disability Film Festival

Uncategorized

The "Patient No More" Mural

Visitor — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 23:07:37 +0000

By: Catherine Kudlick

A large mural features 504 protestors and celebrates the spirit of "Patient No More." Click here to see an expanded photo of the mural.

What might appear to the public as the anchor and one of the most striking features of “Patient No More” was far from certain; in fact, just a week before the exhibit launch, we debated whether it was the right use of our resources.

Still, our team of three - Curator/Graphic Designer Fran Osborne, Longmore Institute Associate Director Emily Beitiks, and Director (Me) - had been planning for something in that great rotunda wall all along. It offered a daunting blank canvas, so central, so white, so easy to make a giant mistake, yet so full of potential. And the ramp wall was red. Very red.

At the beginning we tossed around a number of ideas, from a detailed timeline to a large simple rendering of the iconic “Sign 504 Now!” yellow button or a large “Patient No More” banner.

I can’t remember when we first came upon the idea for the dramatic seventy-foot photomural above the ramp. But it had something to do with the generous photo donations from HolLynn D’Lil, Anthony Tusler, and the Bancroft Library. For the exhibit stations we had sifted through scores of them, nearly all of them black and white. We had to make tough choices about what to include, while having to leave others out. Each time, we came back to the intense, joyful, determined faces of the participants.

For the first couple of years we approached it as a memorial to commemorate the lives of occupiers who had passed away. Naïvely maybe, we believed we could identify and account for everyone in all the photos. But the deeper we got into the project, the more we realized this would be impossible: too many people came and went, too many had disappeared into history.

And there were practical concerns. We dreaded the prospect of someone very much alive arriving at the exhibit only to find themselves up on the wall. And what would we do if someone died once the mural had been put up?

Ultimately, we decided to celebrate the people with disabilities associated with the occupation. We tried to create a mosaic of individuals who made up a vibrant group whose coming together transformed the struggle for disability rights.

If this wasn’t a memorial, we needed to decide on the story we did want to tell, assuming it was possible to tell one at all. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine putting 27 of them in conversation! Who looked at whom across the rounded wall all day and night?

Curator Fran Osborne spent countless hours sifting through photos with students, coming up with templates, sending us different examples, trying to get the balance. Did someone appear too often? Who was missing? Which pictures deserved to be larger? And which ones could actually be blown up to such a large size without being distorted?

We knew so much depended on a viewer’s location while looking at it: from the rotunda, from the ramp itself, going up, going down . . . . Like life itself, things completely changed with perspective.

And how to convey something so striking, so important, so visual to people who couldn’t see it? How to be true to our mission to incorporate access to everything in our exhibit, though not necessarily in the same way for everyone? Our solution: commission poets Eli Clare and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, each who identify as people with disabilities to respond creatively with sound poems (check them out below).

It’s hard to describe my first impression of the mural in all its glory. It sits somewhere between hearing those sound pieces read by the poets and walking into the Ed Roberts Campus rotunda just two days before our launch and seeing it on the wall. It was maybe the closest I came to understanding a sense of victory and permanence after working so hard on something that I sensed deep down would make a difference.

Two mural moments confirmed this was true. The first was the day of our launch when 504 participant Michael Williams posed in front of his photo from 38 years before: wearing the same button, same smile, same sense of defiant pride. Many other occupiers, their friends, their families have found people they knew up on that giant canvas.

Then one day around closing time at the Ed Roberts Campus, I came upon an older gentleman slowly making his way up the ramp where he wanted to get close to the mural. “I always wondered what this place was for!” he exclaimed as he turned to me. “I rush through here every day to catch BART, and for some reason today I looked up. My god, I had no idea! I’ve seen some of these people all over Berkeley!” When I introduced myself as being associated with the mural, he smiled and said, “Wow, this is history!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7U616jiE5M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpF85SfwxIo

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Q&A WITH CATHY KUDLICK AND FRAN OSBORNE

Visitor — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 19:38:20 +0000

Cross-posted from Alice Wong's Disability Visibility Project

This is the first of a two-part interview. Here Cathy and Fran discuss what went into creating and making the “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights” exhibit, the challenges and opportunities.

For the first time, an exhibit on the landmark 504 sit in, “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights,” will be shown July 26-December 18, 2015 at the Ed Roberts Campus, above Ashby BART at 3075 Adeline in Berkeley. The Disability Visibility Project interviewed Cathy Kudlick and Fran Osborne of the Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University about this exhibit.

Where did the idea of the Patient No More come from? Why this subject and why now?

CJK: About ten years ago I attended an exhibit and event at the San Francisco Public Library sponsored by Community Works West where high school students interviewed aging Bay Area Civil Rights leaders. It was incredible because the kids were learning from the leaders by putting together a history exhibit – they did oral histories and mounted creative projects that reflected what they learned. The second these people started talking about their experiences, I began asking myself how I might do something similar about disability rights because I knew the Bay Area played a key role.

I’m a historian with a vision impairment. I’ve been working for about 20 years now to introduce disability history as a field of study. But I wanted desperately to get the fascinating Bay Area contributions to a broader disability rights struggle out to a bigger public, students, colleagues, the average person with and without disabilities on the streets. I know from all my work over the years how despite the fact that people think of History a passé, as an insult (“oh, she’s history!”), being aware that movements and identities have histories can be incredibly empowering – why do you think revolutions want to kill off the historians so they can start with a clean slate? Most people think of disability as a biological, physiological thing that happens to someone, something ahistorical, rather than an identity shaped by history, politics, economics, society, and culture.

FO: The Longmore Institute wanted to create a memorable exhibition to mark the 25^thanniversary of the passing of the ADA, without being a snoozefest of dry policy and explanations of the law. They wanted a project that would be exciting and powerful for the local community, as well as being relevant for a much wider audience. Our initial discussions began to tease out the most compelling stories and content, and we discussed how we could also fulfill the Longmore’s mission to generate new conversations about disability. Fairly soon into the process it became clear that the Section 504 sit-in had more than we needed to produce an exciting and resonant exhibition. What’s more, the protest was carried out for the most part by young people and may therefore have greater resonance online. We knew we could partner with many experts in the local community, that we could interview some of the unsung heroes of this amazing event, and that we might be able to find some photographs and other memorabilia if we kept digging. Cathy and Emily were also committed to experimenting with modes of access and building this thinking into the heart of the project.

Do you feel that the 504 sit in has been adequately documented and recognized in terms of its significance in civil rights history?

CJK: Definitely not. I think that’s about to change with the upcoming anniversary of the ADA and when the 504 protests mark 40 years in 2017. Our exhibit will hopefully help with that, but I’m also thinking of university-trained historians finally waking up to this as an exciting, important moment in US social movement history. It’s been surprising how few historians of the 1960s and 1970s know about this story, even though it directly touches on things they know and care about. Their ignorance isn’t deliberate or conscious – it’s just that they haven’t had much information and haven’t known to even look for it. Once this story sinks into history courses at the graduate and undergraduate level, it will start to make its way into textbooks and teaching K-12. It might be a generation or so before most Americans have a chance to learn about it, but it will happen.

FO: Many people we’ve talked to are not aware of the Section 504 protest and we are excited to think of it becoming a part of the curriculum for students and for educating the wider disability community of the Bay Area who may have no knowledge of the civil rights work of many people with disabilities. Activism may not be as much a part of everyday life as it seems to have been in 1977 but I think people of all ages will be able to relate to the power of a movement centered on a single issue, whether they have a disability or not. I think much more could be done to explore the many stories of Section 504. Exhibitions can only provide a tiny taste of what is available to serious researchers and there is definitely scope for more people to work on the material we came across.

Many people, especially non-historians, do not understand all the work that goes into a history exhibit. Please tell me what is involved in preparing this exhibit by the Longmore Institute staff?

CJK: I’ll let Fran tackle the main story. But what struck me most as a history professor that it was so much about boiling a complex, nuanced story down to fewer and fewer words. We scholars are trained to do exactly the opposite from what is required to create text for an exhibit: we take something relatively small and pour our hearts into writing about every detail. We expand, elaborate, highlight contradictions and confusions. For an exhibit the idea is to boil things down to their most raw essence without completely loosing the spirit and complexity of what we’re talking about. Writing this text is the hardest writing I’ve ever done. When you read the text, you might think: what’s the big deal? How hard is it to come up with 25 words about something? Trust me: it’s nearly impossible! I’m hoping that this skill will help my scholarly writing by making me aware of exactly what needs to be said and why.

FO: We begin with lots of questions. We try to gain an overview of the range of people who can provide first-hand testimony, as well as an idea of the ‘stuff’ we have access to. Usually there are many conflicting narratives and that is great for an exhibition because it demonstrates how varied truth can be. People with direct connections are very important for providing the kind of stories and information that hasn’t made it into the official record. Visitors also expect to find authentic original material to focus their attention on while they take everything in. The term ‘stuff’ is a useful catch all term for describing what the material content of the exhibition will be. Is there a collection of original memorabilia that we know is relevant? If so, whose is it and would they be willing to lend it to the exhibit? Are there photographs, or films, newspaper reports or audio recordings? Have they been seen before? What do the major collecting institutions have? What design and conservation limitations do we have? Is any of the material fragile? Where do we start and of course, how much money do we have? Often, exhibitions involve a good deal of detective work to uncover the most relevant or important objects and material and at the same time, the team will be asking many, many questions about the intellectual and factual content. What do the existing sources say and why do they contradict each other? What are the major themes and how should we present this information? What do we want to leave people with? What interactive elements are appropriate and how will they reinforce the content?

Once the range of material and ideas are clear and assembled, the difficult process of designing, writing and implementing the exhibition begins. After developing the overall ‘concept’ each element is fleshed out and any further research is done. Due diligence in making sure that everything is accurate (and has a reliable source) is crucial in maintaining the public trust with what is presented. More questions ensue: who are those people in that photograph? Is that the best one we have of that story? Where was it taken? What should the credit be? Do we have copyright clearance and are their high-res digital files? As you can imagine, when there are many moving parts, this process can take a long time and as the design and content progresses, things have to be culled and taken out until what remains has earned its place. Every time one element is changed it has a knock-on effect on everything else. Once the main elements are in place, the team continues to refine and finalize the text and all visual, film and audio material and consult with advisors and focus groups to test things out. More revisions are done. Slowly the exhibition gets clearer and clearer. We were lucky to have a relatively long time frame to create the exhibition and it allowed for plenty of conversation and debate that can be quite challenging if time is limited but ultimately creates a better result for the public.

The process involves juggling many things at the same time and is a bit like slowly building a jigsaw puzzle. While some parts are very clear, others are still missing or elusive, and everyone has their own approach. Some people begin with the corners and edges, while others just dive in. The whole team is working together so that the final puzzle will appear in all its glory.

What are some of the challenges you faced in curating, planning and designing this exhibit?

CJK: There were a ton of moving pieces, conceptually and literally. We wanted to honor the participants and the legacy. But we didn’t want it to be a white-washed feel good story because there were tensions and omissions. It was a racially-diverse movement but the leadership was almost exclusively white women in wheelchairs. How could we honor the amazing thing they made happen (in no small part by building bridges to local communities of color such as the Black Panther Party) while honoring the feelings of some participants of color that their story hasn’t really been part of the 504 and disability rights stories? And how to acknowledge the divides among various impairment groups without erasing the awesome collaboration, connections, and esprit de corps that brought everyone together and created a more-or-less unified disability rights movement that helped bring about the ADA?

Another challenging piece was our decision early on to build in multiple forms of access at every stage.

FO: This really is the most complex exhibition project I’ve ever known and Patient No More has required a different level of attention for all kinds of reasons. We have been re-visiting an event that had its own mythology and which was clearly a life-changing event for many people who went on to be activists and campaigners. How would we honor those experiences and involve new audiences? We have been consulting with the local disability community, asking for feedback and prototyping as much as is practical with our resources and capacity, as well as consulting with museum experts far and wide. Although our budget is fixed, the scope of the project is ambitious and meant also generating our own content through the 40 video interviews, which was quite a project in itself. Cathy mentions above the issues we encountered in working on the deeper aspects of the protest and they continue to come up in discussions. Other challenges were practical and frustrating. Initially we couldn’t find some of the people we knew we wanted to interview. We’d hear reports of them but then the trail would go cold. We would persist but it was not easy. Sometimes phone numbers might be wrong or the person may have left the area. Sometimes people were willing to meet but didn’t want to be interviewed on camera. We were also told that journalist Evan White who had covered the protest for Channel 7 might have passed away. We suspected he was still around and eventually located him and interviewed him at the ERC but we collectively worried a great deal about getting as representative range of people as possible, especially those who had never had their opportunity to tell their story. The Longmore team did a great job of coordinating all the interviews but then of course, the raw footage of the interviews has to be transcribed and after a clear plan, has to be edited into short meaningful films, with captions and then … audio description … which means there must be delicate editing of timing. Every element had to be thought of in access terms. When there is text, we have to consider the vocabulary and reading level. When there are images, we have to consider how a blind visitor or visitor with a vision impairment will have an equivalent experience? One of the greatest challenges for the designers is that the ERC has several entrances and exits and a linear journey around the exhibition would not work. In addition, the structures have to be capable of being moved out of the space for ERC events. The designers faced considerable challenges in creating structures that would fit through doorways on the basement level of the ERC, would still fulfill ADA requirements, have power for video monitors showing interviews, and incorporate Braille as part of the design. Space was always an issue as you may imagine. I’m hesitant to say more but I hope we’ve conveyed just how complex this exhibition is.

How did you engage with the disability community in terms of outreach and participation in the Patient No More?

CJK: We’ve had many formal and informal conversations throughout the process. We’ve solicited feedback on all of the text and oral history interviews. We invited people from the community to attend access “charettes” (feedback sessions) about the interactive elements. Our design team camped out at the Ed Roberts Campus for a day and approached people to ask them to interact with everything from text size to buttons on the tv screen.

FO: We learned so much from these early meetings and testing sessions and continue to consult and incorporate feedback from the community. We tested our interactive concepts at the Disability Pride march and festival organized by the Silicon Valley Independent Living Center in 2014. We had a great time telling people about the exhibit and asking them to test out our interactive ideas. People learn so much more when they can engage in a personal and direct way. Road-testing always makes a big difference. I wish we had the resources and time to do more.

Early on we also wanted to develop close working relationships with those who were there, and contacted as many people as we could who had been in the protest. Even now, new people are coming forward to tell us of their involvement, or relay their memories of the protest. Everyone had a lead for someone else or a newspaper clipping or a story that we had never heard before. Ken Stein has a great series of recordings and pointed us to other collections in the Bancroft and as time went on we discovered other protesters who had treasures they were willing to lend. HolLynn D’Lil had a huge archive of photographs she had taken in the San Francisco protest and from the group visit to Washington. She also had her own archive of notebooks and copies of letters and flyers and press releases that gave us a huge boost in understanding the protest directly from original material. The more people we talked to the better our sense of the protest became and the more engaged we hope the community is. As Cathy says, we had design charrettes early on and have continued to consult with individuals and interested groups. Cathy and Emily really are experts in access and their contribution is huge. As a sighted person it is very easy for me to forget how biased museum exhibitions are in favor of the visual. We had to be mindful that not every person with a visual impairment may read Braille or have the funds for a smart phone. Most recently we have been working with the access team at the Lighthouse For The Blind in SF who are providing Braille for the exhibit. Often issues and problems get solved in these small group meetings in ways that are so satisfying. We may still make mistakes but we are doing everything we can to incorporate access in a dynamic and inclusive way. I’ve also become quite aware of the need to expand the understanding of 504 and how it protects peoples’ rights. It’s almost as if a new round of 504 and ADA trainings are needed to inform the younger generations of people with disabilities.

For more information on Patient No More, open July 26, 2015, Berkeley, CA:

PatientNoMore.org

Catherine J. Kudlick – Director

After more than two decades at the University of California at Davis, Catherine Kudlick was delighted to join San Francisco State as Professor of History in Fall 2012 to assume directorship of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability.

Fran Osborne – Curator and Graphic Designer

Fran Osborne has a BA (Hons) in Typography & Graphic Communication from Reading University in England and an MA in Museum Studies from SF State University. She has a special interest in bi or multilingual interpretation in museums and other cultural facilities and has international experience in Arabic speaking countries. Based in California, she is currently volunteering at SFMoMA and SFOpera. Recently, she was the curator of DIS/PLAY: A Disability Take-Over Show By Artists With, and Without, an exhibit featured at SOMArts in San Francisco.

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Disability Visibility Project

What Would You Have Done? Missing Kitty Cone (1944-2015)

Visitor — Sat, 25 Apr 2015 18:35:38 +0000

By: Catherine Kudlick

[Note: this Sunday, April 26, 2PM at the Ed Roberts Campus above Ashby BART, Bay Area people with disabilities and allies will gather to honor the life of a woman who history will one day credit with changing US history. Kitty Cone, along with Judy Heumann, was one of the key organizers behind the events that we’ll be portraying on our upcoming exhibit to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in July. In the post below I trace her unlikely impact on me.]

As we reach the final stretch for launching our exhibit “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights” that opens at the Ed Roberts Campus in July, I’ve been consumed with a burning question: what would I have done? Would I have gone in to occupy a federal building for 26 days with over one hundred people I didn’t know, disabled people? Could I then or now sleep on the floor, bathe in a sink, eat food brought by strangers, live with crabs and who knows what else, for nearly a month? Would I have resisted the siren song of friends and family, clueless about disability politics as they gently mocked me about a cause I didn’t yet know enough about to believe in?

Kitty Cone, who to everyone’s great sadness died on March 21, was a central figure in the Section 504 Occupation of San Francisco’s Federal Building back in April 1977. She understood the deep connections between personal activism and political change. She could explain in basic ways how individual people could make a difference by insisting that President Jimmy Carter’s administration come through on a promise they’d made to sign legislation that had been languishing for four years, Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act that would guarantee people with disabilities their civil rights. And she knew how to build bridges between various local community groups and leaders who could support the protesters inside. Her persuasiveness and carefully-crafted alliances helped ensure the success of 504 and ultimately helped pave the way for passing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.

In April 1977 I was an awkward kid in college at UC Santa Cruz, excited about my upcoming junior year abroad in France. I didn’t know any other disabled people, because I didn’t want to. My community was friends from my dorm. We had in-jokes and talked late into the night about our classes, our professors, our families, each other, the crappy dining hall food, our hopes for the future. I’d like to think of myself as political, but I wasn’t. I was just an insecure gal looking for myself and hoping people would like me or at least not taunt me like they had for most of my life about my “weird eyes.” I didn’t know to think of what we today call “bullying” as political, as part of a bigger civil rights struggle.

Given how much time I spent secluded in my dorm room struggling to read the small print in my books for class as I hid (from) my vision impairment, little wonder that I had no idea that a revolution was taking place just 75 miles away up in San Francisco.

What if I’d met Kitty back then? Many of the people we have interviewed for “Patient No More” described her as the one who urged them in and gave them strength. Her activism extended far beyond strategizing a revolution of disabled people: there was something deeper, something about her that made you feel part of something bigger, gave you a sense of purpose that was profound, real, full of conviction.

I often fantasize that if I’d met Kitty Cone in 1977, I would have marched right in, claimed my identity as a person with a disability and taken my place in history. But the truth is, I’m not sure I would have been ready.

Yet Kitty made me a revolutionary. Rather than awaken a future me, our talks thirty-five years later put me in touch with that scared Cathy on the threshold and accept that college kid for who she was: someone poised for a new adventure where she’d live in a foreign culture among people who didn’t speak her language. I was about to occupy my own building back then, laying the groundwork for the activist I would become. The remarkable thing was that Kitty taught me this without our actually having spoken of it. She understood something about activism that never gets acknowledged: it is as much about extending tools to draw strength and integrity from a painful past as it is about charting the future.

To celebrate Kitty, the Longmore Institute has compiled a video from clips of our extensive interview with her for “Patient No More.” The video is captioned and audio-described.

https://youtu.be/759dirUhsKc

To learn more about “Patient No More” that will be at the Ed Roberts Campus above Ashby BART in Berkeley from July 26 - December 18, go here.

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Why Disability History Matters

Visitor — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 17:43:14 +0000

By: Guest Blogger Alice Wong, Project Coordinator, Disability Visibility Project

Reposted from the Disability Visibility Project and Disability.gov blog

I was 16 when President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on July 26, 1990. I can’t remember if I had any particular awareness or excitement about the passage of this landmark piece of legislation. At that time, I had little knowledge of the independent living movement or disability history. In the prehistoric era before social media, I was unconnected to other people with disabilities like myself—it took me a while to become politicized and find ‘my crip tribe.’

As many organizations plan national and local events celebrating the upcoming 25^th anniversary of the ADA, I wondered what I could do to highlight the current zeitgeist of the disability experience while honoring the past.

I recently launched the Disability Visibility Project: A Community Partnership with StoryCorps. The project is a year-long grassroots campaign that encourages people with disabilities to record their stories at StoryCorps in celebration of the upcoming 25th anniversary of the ADA in 2015. By tagging their StoryCorps recordings as part of the Disability Visibility Project, participants will have their stories archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Their stories will be searchable by the name of the project.

It’s been a pretty exciting experience so far. The response from the Bay Area disability community has been tremendous. We also have more than 20 media partners comprised of individuals and organizations in the disability community that are helping us with outreach and publicity.

With the 24^th anniversary of the ADA coming this Saturday, I had the opportunity to interview one of our media partners, Catherine Kudlick, professor of history and director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State University.

Q: Why are you interested in participating in the Disability Visibility Project?

A: I’m a big fan of StoryCorps, but I think the disability perspective, especially one grounded in political and cultural awareness needs greater visibility, both for all people with disabilities and for the general public.

Q: Who do you plan to record your story with? What are some reasons you are having a conversation with this person?

A: Georgina Kleege, a writer and English professor at UC Berkeley and I are both “imperfectly blind” academics, so we share similar experiences of being in this funny middle place that not many people acknowledge; for most people, if you call yourself blind you must see nothing or else you’ve got to be a sighted person. Most people with vision impairments are somewhere between these two places, so Georgina and I have built up a friendship that explores this. It’s really important to talk both with other disabled people, but also with someone who shares a similar disability.

Q: Why is disability history important to all Americans, but Americans with disabilities in particular?

A: History gives us the tools to think about us—whoever that us is—as being part of something bigger; we have a past, which means that we have a present and a future. Because disability has been ignored for so long, it’s important for the general public and people with disabilities to learn that it played an important part, not just because of a few important people who defined a movement, but also for how we think about things like productive labor, our healthcare system, the impact of war and how our nation establishes various hierarchies. By understanding how disabled people are defined by these experiences and often helped define them is tremendously empowering both individually and collectively.

Q: As a historian, what are the top three books on disability history people should read in light of the 24th anniversary of the ADA?

A: Kim Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States. Paul Longmore’s Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Joseph Shapiro’s No Pity remains a classic published in the early 1990s, but I suggest it because it still offers a broad context for people who don’t know much about disability in the U.S. and as an NPR journalist, Shapiro tells good stories. I know that Lennard Davis is completing a book on the history of the ADA, but I have not seen it.

History gives us a sense of who we are and where we are going. Disability history is so much more than the ‘big names’ familiar to most such as Helen Keller, FDR, Ed Roberts, Judith Heumann and Justin Dart. Organizations like StoryCorps give everyone the opportunity to document their stories, preserving history from the ground up.

The goal of the Disability Visibility Project is simple: “Recording disability history, one story at a time.” Happy 24^th Anniversary, ADA!

Alice Wong is a staff research associate at the Community Living Policy Center, a Rehabilitation Research and Training Center funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research and the Administration for Community Living. She is also a council member on the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency. This guest blog post reflects her views alone. You can find her on Twitter: @SFdirewolf

Additional information for the Disability Visibility Project:

Website: http://disabilityvisibilityproject.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/356870067786565/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DisVisibility

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Disability Visibility Project

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