Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - blind people

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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audio description

blind people

museums

access

accessibility

Dennis Billups: An Activist through the Disability Rights Movement, Two Tech Booms, and a Housing Crisis

Visitor — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:36:18 +0000

By: Asa Arnold

The experiences of Dennis Billups reveal two things that are overlooked in today’s discussions of disabled people in tech: 1) we live in a second tech boom (the first was the “Dot-Com” era at the end of the 1990s) and 2) people with disabilities play important roles in tech that are completely unrelated to programming, development and access. Interviewer Asa Arnold and Dennis Billups

As an African-American man with a visible disability, Dennis predated today’s discussions of diversity in tech by a generation. He worked in the dot-com era. Many times, when he took the train to his job in Silicon Valley he was given free fares because people found it so remarkable that a blind man was going to work at all. A participant in the 504 occupation of the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977, he has long been an activist who focuses on increasing economic power for disabled people [click to view our oral history interview with Dennis to learn more]. Since working as a telephone operator and information specialist for various Silicon Valley companies in the 1990s, he has first-hand experience with the effects of gentrification, the changing skillsets required in today’s tech world compared to thirty years ago, and ideas around people with disabilities. In each area, he finds both positives and negatives.

In the mid-80s, Dennis was looking for a job, but was unable to find one that would let him stay close to his wife who he had recently married. After a while, a representative from the Department of Rehab came to him about a job program in Silicon Valley and said, “We want you to become our poster child because you had a good speaking voice, you speak clearly, and you’re around a lot of people and a lot of people like you.” Dennis enrolled in the program and became a phone operator and information specialist at various computer chip companies in Silicon Valley. He describes his job as being “the person who did the calls, made sure packages got out, faxing in and remembering names of people and changing the phone list…letting people know what’s going on with the company.”

Dennis’ experience working in Silicon Valley during the Dot-Com boom was remarkably positive. This can partially be attributed to his job working well with his personality and skill set, but it was also due to supportive coworkers and workplace accommodations. He had documents provided in braille in addition to teachers who explained what he needed to do; his accommodations were “a natural thing.” Dennis also got on well with people in the office; for example, he would tease them when the lights went out, offering to guide them to the bathroom. One engineer and friend of Dennis’ would give him tours of the workplace, saying “you don’t need to be isolated at that desk all the time.”

With the money from his job and some struggle, Dennis and his wife bought a house in Bayview/Hunter’s Point, San Francisco in 1994 so they could settle down. He lived in the house for 20 years. In 2015, five years after his wife had died and 15 years after being laid off from his job, Dennis found himself being evicted due to failure to make monthly mortgage payments. Believing it unfair as he feels he was not given adequate time to prove he could make payments, having been receiving notification in print rather than braille, he has been challenging the decision. In general, Dennis is disappointed in how gentrification is sweeping San Francisco and pushing many (including disabled people like himself) out of their homes. He finds the trend “really uncomfortable, disheartening, maddening…Bayview and Hunter’s Point were the last community for African Americans.” Despite this, his goal is to return to his home and control some property to stop the gentrification and bring disabled people back into the neighborhood. Dennis says, “it’s never too late, as long as you can get one foothold you can get another one just like they do.”

Like many, Dennis lost his job when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, in his case because many of his responsibilities as an operator were becoming automated. He recalls two good friends and coworkers warned him ahead of time, “Den, you’re going to get fired, and it has nothing to do with you, it’s a company thing.” He had an opportunity to retrain for working on the web which was just starting to take off, but he decided to stay at home to take care of his wife who had grown increasingly sick. He has been unemployed since then and now focuses on advocacy. Dennis believes “we have a chance to do something for disability, especially when it comes to economic chances.”

Having lived through a disability rights movement, two tech booms, and a housing crisis, Dennis is surprisingly upbeat. “We need all kinds of people and all kinds of opportunities,” he says. “That’s how change happens.”

Students for Access also sees the chance to do something for disability, and aims to improve the employment situation for people with disabilities in tech through our summer project. We thank Dennis for sharing his story with us. Dennis Billups during the 1977 504 sit-in.

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People with Disabilities in Tech

San Francisco

Silicon Valley

technology

Why the Dissies?

Visitor — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 17:08:46 +0000

By: Catherine Kudlick

Earlier this year the Longmore Institute took over running Superfest International Disability Film Festival along with the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind. Occasionally we’ll blog about our behind-the-scenes thinking and plans, our debates, our challenges in taking over this venerable Bay Area disability cultural institution, the world’s longest-running disability film festival.

In the spirit of the celebrated Hollywood send-up, “The Razzies,” we will host our first event, “The Dissies,” on Saturday, October 12. Temporarily departing from the traditional film festival format, this one-night retrospective will gather together the formidable Bay Area disability community for an unflinching, entertaining look at the worst of the worst clips in US film representations of disability. With that renewed sense of pride that comes from bonding over reclaiming an uncomfortable past, we can return to the true work of Superfest next year to celebrate disability films that showcase our community’s ingenuity and creativity.

But for now, as we fundraise and begin to put our submission and judging processes in place, we wanted to try something unprecedented in the disability community: take the sting out of the negativity disabled people face by unpacking it together among friends. After all, it’s one thing to attend mainstream screenings or watch them at home alone, and quite another to arrive knowing that we’re among fellow-travelers whose primary aim is to shatter these images and to have some fun. Think of it like emotional judo, where a combatant temporarily works with the opponent’s force in order to triumph; you’ve got to understand that force in all its complexity to own it and make it work for you.

Besides, when we go to the movies, how often do we see disability up there on the big screen and get to laugh at outrageous portrayals and comment on them? As an imperfectly blind moviegoer myself, I am there, making conscious and subconscious comparisons with the actors and their situations: do they remind me of anyone I know and love? Do they suggest anything about me, the person I hope to be or the one I secretly dread? And how do I feel about my fellow audience members as I watch these projections: have I dissolved into being an anonymous member of a crowd or am I hiding alone among the many?

All movie-going puts people in that unnamed space between being an individual viewer and part of a whole. But when are we invited to experience this and act on it in a big room where others have shared many of the same emotions related to disability? How often do we get to indulge in acts of collective indignation at tired-old stereotypes and clichés, cloying exaggerations, cheap shots at disabled people and disability by gasping, hooting, laughing, raising collective fist and finger (or whatever real or imagined body part) into the air to say “enough already!”

Whether films take us somewhere far away outside or deep down inside, they involve an intimate dance between projection and reflection, a giant flickering mirror, not just back to us, but to the society and culture we live in. They shape how we see ourselves individually and collectively, how others see us, and how we see others. This is why movies matter, why they occupy a key intersection where entertainment, psychology, and social justice meet.

And it’s why it matters when those of us with disabilities see someone with a disability up there on the screen. For me as someone who grew up shaped by taunting and isolation, the pathetic portrayals of blind characters played by clueless sighted ones reinforced my worst fears of being an ugly, unloveable person who held things close to my face and who too often mis-reached or bumped into things and missed sighted cues, only to discover I had been the butt of a cruel joke. It didn’t help that I only came upon humiliating caricatures of someone like me, still too common, such as the recent one trotted out in the trailer for a fake Will Smith movie, Blind Ref? And what about all the movies about other disabilities, slavishly remaining true to stereotypes that careen between menace and being pathetic? (I won’t suggest any here, since I don’t want to influence the nominations and voting!) But for a compilation of twentieth-century movies made in the US and a schema for thinking about them, see Martin Norden’s Cinema Of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (Rutgers, 1994).

So let us come together – people with disabilities, our friends, our allies, and anyone curious enough to wonder what the fuss is all about - to hijack this dreariness by having it on our terms rather than ones dictated to us by outdated scripts. As individual viewers, most of us lack the power to dethrone the seemingly unassailable images, leaving us to feel empty and isolated, and even unsure if we’re right to challenge an industry that is so entrenched and well-financed. Sitting in a large room together with popcorn, we discover that we have never been alone when we squirm - it’s just that we never knew there could be people who thought like us right there in the audience despite what we saw up on the screen. Thanks to the Bay Area’s rowdy, savvy, audacious, smart audience of people with disabilities, we can begin to question a tired past from a place of power in a spirit of camaraderie and fun.

The process of owning the past involves actually looking at it from time to time, to see where we’ve been and celebrate the progress we’ve achieved as a movement. Combined with growing numbers of more nuanced portrayals that Superfest will showcase in the future, events such as the Dissies can help a generation of current and future filmmakers and filmgoers change expectations. For this important evening together, everyone will be experts charged with exposing and denouncing the old stereotypes for what they are. By collectively unpacking the negatives that mainstream society has forced in front of us, people with disabilities and our allies can insist on images that reflect and project the more fascinating realities we know to be true. And basking in these new reflections, we can constructively move forward with better ideas of who we are to others and to ourselves.

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people with disabilities