accessibility

Dancing in the Dark

Brushing up on some accessibility and listening to the new 13 Letters podcast, I ran into this moving story from an interview with Haben Girma, a lawyer and the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School:

"Enchanted Hills, for those who don't know, is a camp for the blind in Napa, ran by the LightHouse, and many kids who are blind go to schools where they're the only blind student, or maybe they're one of two or three. I attended mainstream public schools. There were other blind students, probably, blind minority. Camp was an opportunity for one week each year, where our blindness was no big deal. At camp, it was cool to be blind. In that environment, you could focus on building up your other skills and developing community pride.

One of my stories in my book is about how I learned from a blind dance instructor that I can also do salsa, swing, merengue, and other ballroom dances. When I started out, I was shocked, how would a blind person teach a dance class? The counselors essentially said, "Go and try it and find out." It's a huge revelation for kids to meet successful confident blind adults and learn from them. Camp was an opportunity for us to do them.

I started learning dance at Enchanted Hills Camp from a blind dance instructor. She showed me the movements, the steps. Then, when I went to college, I tried going to dances. I realized it's really hard to find someone to dance with when you can't see him. What do you do? Do you stop going to the dances? For a while, I wasn't sure what to do. Then I came up with a plan. My plan was when I dance with someone at the end of the dance, ask them, "Can you introduce me to another dancer?" Then they'll introduce me to a dancer, I'll have another dance. At the end of the dance, I'll ask, "Can you introduce me to another dancer?"

When I'm dancing, I don't feel disabled. I'm fully connected with the person I'm dancing with, with the music, with the whole community. I love having that moment, where I'm fully connected and I don't have to worry about accommodations or communication. It all flows easily. When I dance, I can't hear the beat in the music, I can't see any other dances, but I can feel the rhythm and beat through the hands and shoulders of the people I'm dancing with. I focus on partner dances because there's not a physical connection through hands and shoulders when you're dancing."


I don't have a working definition of accessibility that I use, but I think this is a beautiful start.

>  26 April 2020 | LINK | Filed in
Be My Eyes: an iPhone app connecting blind people with volunteers to read live video and answer questions.

Twitter  15 January 2015 | LINK | Filed in
FS Me. Fontsmith Me “FS Me is [a type family] designed to aid legibility for those with learning disability. FS Me was researched and developed in conjunction with - and endorsed by - Mencap, the UK’s leading charity and voice for those with learning disability. Mencap receive a donation for each font licence purchased.”

Related: Read Regular, a typeface for people with dyslexia.
>  1 November 2011 | LINK | Filed in ,
screenfont.ca. Discussion of readable type for captions and subtitles from the Open & Closed Project. See, for instance, this critique of existing typefaces for HDTV captioning.
>  15 February 2008 | LINK | Filed in , , ,
The Open & Closed Project. “A new research project headquartered in Toronto. Our main goal is to improve quality by setting standards for the four fields of accessible media – captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing. We’ll develop those standards through research and evidence-gathering. Where research or evidence is missing on a certain topic, we’ll carry it out ourselves. We’ll test the finished standards for a year in the real world, then publish them. Then we’ll develop training and certification programs for practitioners. ” Not much there yet, but I like this direct approach. I hope legislative advocacy will follow.
>  15 February 2008 | LINK | Filed in , , , ,
Universal Design in the Washington Post. A nice introduction. And nice to see some mainstream exposure.
>  21 March 2007 | LINK | Filed in
Falling. In the U.S., falls are the leading cause of injury-related deaths among people 65 and older. ‘Environmental risk factors may contribute to about half of all home falls.’ More stats from the CDC.
>  1 January 2007 | LINK | Filed in
>  30 December 2006 | LINK | Filed in ,
Travel with a Disability Photo Group. More Flickr solidarity.
>  25 August 2006 | LINK | Filed in , ,
Only 11 percent of NYC subway stations are wheelchair accessible. That’s 53 of 468 stations. The MTA’s $192 million earmarked for wheelchair accessibility through 2009 will make 15 more stations accessible.
>  4 April 2006 | LINK | Filed in , , ,



page 3 2 1 Older »