Daily Archives: 10 May, 2010

Guest Post by Lightgetsin: The one where I shout about able-bodied technology privilege for a while

accessibility, social attitudes, technology

Guest post bylightgetsin, originally posted April 29, 2010.

I love it when well-meaning able-bodied people try to pimp their technology at me because hey, they just got this new gadget, and it’s accessible, isn’t that cool? I should get one!

No. No it is not, and no I will not, and I am getting progressively less and less polite about this. Like the random dude this morning who was all, “my GPS talks, you should get one!”

Okay. For the record. Your GPS may “talk,” but it is not accessible. Maybe it will vocalize directions, but what good does that do me? How am I supposed to use the touch screen controls, all the menus with no speech, the setup process, the default reliance on graphical maps? I mean, seriously, in what universe where you think about this for more than five seconds is that accessible?

As a matter of fact, I do have a GPS. It is not the cute little “it’s only $250” model this guy shoved at me this morning. Mine cost seventeen hundred dollars, runs on a proprietary software platform, is three times the size, and currently has wildly outdated maps.

“It talks” =/= accessible.

Also, telling me after I point out that a website is really inaccessible that “it has hotkeys, you know,” is not helpful. Hotkeys, on the extremely rare occasion they actually work (they are usually duplicative and suppressed by all my intricate native Windows and screenreader keyboard commands), also =/= accessibility. I can maybe hit a link, but how am I supposed to, I don’t know, read the website text? Awkward.

Also, the next person to tell me to get a Kindle . . . really shouldn’t. The Kindle occasionally reads a book out loud, though of course not as many now that Amazon has thrown its users under the buss in the face of an illusory and baseless copyright complaint. I’ve helped out with the Reading Rights Coalition, so I could go on about this at great length. But the Kindle itself is not accessible, and Amazon has no plans to make the relatively minor adjustments to make it baseline usable.

I have a handheld reading device. Hint: it cost more than a Kindle.

Accessibility comes at a financial premium as much as five or six times the going market rate for any given device, and usually runs years behind the curve. I’m going to need to use a Blackberry next year – an access solution for Blackberry just came out a few months ago (costing several hundred dollars over top of the normal Blackberry purchase price, of course), and by all accounts it is a largely nonfunctional piece of crap.

Apple might be pursuing out-of-the-box accessibility with no consumer premium, but pretty much no one else is. And OSX still isn’t a viable choice for me as Voiceover doesn’t do a half dozen things I need it to. So no, random gadget probably isn’t accessible, and frankly I’d rather not hear about it and have to explain again why not and just how much more money I will be paying for something that does less.

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American Apparel, Meet American Able

bodies, media and pop culture, normality, othering,

Oh, American Apparel. For those of you lucky enough to evade their reach, AA is a good company with a lot of problems. They started out selling themselves as the sweatshop-free, made in the USA, source for cotton basics like t-shirts, primarily wholesaling to people who would print and resell the clothes. In 2003, AA got into the retail business and started aggressively developing their brand, largely through their … controversial advertising style and campaigns.

The ads feature “ordinary girls” who tend to be young and thin (they’ve been described as “pre-pubescent“), are mostly white, and are often nude and/or in sexually suggestive poses. It is heavily featured on their website and in their stores, and the store employees are selected to resemble the ad models. I don’t want to post any of the images here, but you can see some examples here, here, and here (NSFW? Potentially? I wasn’t even looking for bad ones – those were the first ones in the Google search.). I live in Los Angeles – where AA is based – and I can walk to at least two AA retail stores from my house. There are billboards and store displays and newspaper ads and posters of AA ads seemingly everywhere I look, and beyond that, I see the same style replicated in other magazines and videos and tv shows and …

So when I saw the photo exhibit “American Able” float across my tumblr dashboard this afternoon, I was really excited. The photographer, Holly Norris, explains the project:

‘American Able’ intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media. I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women who are employees, friends and fans of the company. However, these women fit particular body types. Their campaigns are highly sexualized and feature women who are generally thin, and who appear to be able-bodied. Women with disabilities go unrepresented, not only in American Apparel advertising, but also in most of popular culture. Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable.’ In a society where sexuality is created and performed over and over within popular culture, the invisibility of women with disabilities in many ways denies them the right to sexuality, particularly within a public context.

The photos are amazing! They are spot-on emulations of the AA ad style, but feature Jes Sachse as a model. Sache, who in another amazing photo project explains that her spine was fused as a child, looks enthusiastic, playful, sexy as hell, and very different from AA’s usual TAB models. The photos are all copyrighted so I can’t embed any of them here, but I really strongly encourage you to click through and look at the whole series!

There has been some discussion of whether this art project “works”, in terms of making the intended point of mocking the original ads and portraying a woman with disabilities in a positive and sexualized context. I’m not sure that’s a concern for me – I can’t see these photos gaining enough exposure or distribution to cause any serious harm to PWDs, even if people do feel disgusted or upset at the images. For me, their true power is how they both quickly and precisely underlining the narrowness of the American Apparel view of beauty, while demonstrating that PWDs can be enthusiastically sexual. Ms. Sachse looks like she is having a blast, which also makes me happy.

What do you think?

Recommended Reading for May 10, 2010

recommended reading

I’m sorry this is much later than usual. Today was the beginning of Don’s Radioactive Iodine Treatment, and I’ve not been myself. The folks at the hospital are being awesome, though, so everything should be fine.

Normalizing Ableism (ahahah like it’s not already)

I like this article (it’s from 2005); it’s got some really lovely ideas, about creating your own paths, and educating and design through what people choose and it’s a nice ‘think outside the box’ sort of article.

I just wish it didn’t start with this:

In the park where we play, there are nicely laid out concrete paths, leading from the swings to the picnic tables, from the castle to the soccer field, from the water fountain to the bridge, from here to there, from A to B.

And then there are the real paths, the dirt ones, the ones that shoot out from the concrete to connect where people really go, to memorialize the real actions of children playing, to acknowledge the real patterns of living, of human purpose, of some honest destination.

Forced sterilisation: a western issue too [Comments are a mess, I strongly recommend avoiding them]

A systemic devaluation of disability still exists, which allows the continual questioning of not only reproductive rights, but also the humanity of differently abled people. Because some of the conditions are deemed to be inheritable, sterilisation has historically been considered a viable social option – and though not enforced, many states still have coercive sterilisation laws on the books. The eugenicist approach to the disabled can be evidenced by the 186 deaths at “state facilities for the retarded over 18 months” in Austin, Texas.

It has to be you

I sometimes get a little embarassed for these people who, although they identify as progressive or radical, seem to have just begun grappling with the problem that a given marginalized population is made up of individual people.

Spark of Wisdom: Silence is justice delayed – perhaps even justice reversed

There are many more subtle forces that demand silence. Sometimes every time you try to address a topic, people swoop in to derail and distract. Fans of politicians or institutions will shout you down for daring to speak against their hero. People with their own agendas will demand those of the marginalised be put on hold – perhaps indefinitely. People will decide that equality is a lower priority. People will demand you put your agenda on hold and get behind issues that affect the populace as a whole – which is fine, but the populace as a whole won’t be there when the marginalised issues rise again – if they ever do. No end of people – even within our own orgs – will hit us with tone arguments – telling us to calm down, to stop criticising, to be patient, to, ultimately, shut up and wait to be noticed. Wait until the powers that be have time for you – if they ever do. Accept the crumbs they give you, the gestures, the tokens and shut up and be grateful for them. They will chide us for our impatience, our selfishness. They will insult our fight for justice as “selfish” “whining” and “sensitive.” They will belittle our pain and our losses and our anger.

Why I find your rhetoric about parenting so disturbing [Trigger Warning for disablist language and violent language]

I’m familiar with the argument that what they are truly concerned about is the safety of the children. But this is a fallacy rooted in the myth that only wealthy, neurotypical, able-bodied white couples are “capable” of raising children “properly”. What is usually meant by “properly” is being able to afford the best schools, the finest organic food, a house in a neighborhood with a lovely playground. But swiping motherhood away from women like me is not a solution. Truly, if they were concerned about the welfare of children, more effort would be made towards an end to environmental racism that forces poor women of colour into neighborhoods that are overcrowded, dangerous, and devoid of parks, green spaces and grocery stores. Or an effort to support poor families through reevaluation of wealth distribution in this country. Instead, we get rhetoric about how people like me aren’t fit to have children, based solely on a neurotypical’s notion of who is a good parent.

New Community on LJ: Film & Lit Crit about Disability

Book Reviews!

“The Shuttle” by Frances Hodgson Burnet The book is available free from Girl E-Books. I include it because the book deals with PTSD as caused by a violent relationship.

Carnivals!
Down Under Feminist Carnival has many awesome links to check out.

Headlines:

Canada: Province Cuts Some Birth Control for low-income women

Science Reporting Smell-Test of the Week [About the bad science in the reporting of the “link” between depression and/or drug abuse and abortion]