Gendered Thoughts

When you show up, you’ll probably also hear, “why are you angry?”

“These words “It’ll be accessible” doesn’t mean what it says. If you are disabled, and you hear this phrase, what it really means is, “Our assistant manager knows someone with a disability, and they did just fine at our event/store/business/service/etc.” It certainly doesn’t mean it’ll be accessible.

Access Disappointment

I was in NYC. I decided to go to a Broadway show (I’m going to defer from saying which one right now). I did research ahead of time, since musicals can be extremely challenging for me under the best of circumstances, for a bunch of reasons — sitting next to strangers (challenges my anxiety), worries about going into new spaces, concerns about bathroom access (mainly for trans, not disability, reasons), crowd noise before and after the show, and, most relevant to this story, the difficulty I have in making out the lyrics to songs.

So I researched the production and theater, and was relieved to see that they offered both assistive listening devices and the venue was equipped with a inductive hearing assistant loop. Because they didn’t bother to say where to get an assistive listening devices, and I didn’t want to go around asking people, I opted for the loop. A inductive hearing assistance loop is essentially a way of wirelessly transmitting audio information so hearing aid users can listen to audio, essentially like if they had noise cancelling headphones (albeit the fidelity is usually not anywhere near that good!). I can turn off the microphones on my hearing aid, and just listen to the sound through the T-Coil. That way I don’t amplify the sound of the person next to me but do amplify the actual musical. While many hearing aids have this tech built-into them to pick up this type of hearing assistance, mine uses an external accessory–a small electronic box about the size of a deck of cards, and, in the best tradition of assistive technology, seemingly designed by some first year electrical engineering student with all the design sense of a kindergartner asked to draw the house they would like to live in. But it works. One huge benefit of loop-equipped venues is that you don’t need to disclose you need an accommodation–it just works. Or in theory it does.

I prepared myself with scripts if the ushers or others asked what the electrical box was (they, of course, would not want the performance recorded by me, and it looks like it could be a recorder of some type): “I’m a hearing aid user, and this let’s me pick up the inductive loop’s audio with my hearing aids. I was ready.

So when I was seated and the production started, of course it didn’t work. Oh, my tech was fine. The productions’ however wasn’t. My guess is that nobody involved with the production uses hearing aids (or if they do, they weren’t taught about inductive loops). I can always tell when an organization doesn’t actually have anyone on staff with a similar disability to mine! So I dealt with it, as I usually do, and missed out on a lot of the lyrics. Next time I’ll know better.

That’s access disappointment.

Access Anger

But sometimes it can turn to anger.

At another event, I was to attend a meeting/session. It was going to be in a room with a hybrid format, so I asked a CART (real time captioning) captioner to join the event with me, and arranged for them to caption to a website that I could view on my phone during the meeting. I would show up in person, but the captions would show up on my phone–I love modern tech! This would allow me to participate reasonably well in this meeting.

So, when I showed up, they announced that the session would no longer be hybrid, and be in a different room (rather than a medium sized conference room, it would be held in a large auditorium–which means even more difficulty, particularly since people would be seated throughout the room and far from me, and it was intended to be interactively). The hybrid option was cancelled so “we could get more work done.” I was angry. I arranged access to the previous space. So I talked to the person running the session, and made my needs clear. Of course that didn’t help.

So when they asked at the start of the meeting, “Can everyone hear me okay?” I replied “no” (I could hear them well enough for this, which probably looks like someone being difficult, since I could figure out the question [I have enough experience “filling in the gaps” I can make it through simple phrases in expected contexts like this, but knew I was going to miss a bunch of the meeting without captions, so, essentially, I knew I would NOT be hearing the session okay]). I was told again why it wasn’t hybrid. And I did say something along the lines that I’m angry–which is something that isn’t acceptable for a disabled trans woman. We’re never supposed to be angry.

Eventually a half-solution was figured out, and I could hear at least some of what was going on. But I did leave angry.

Expectations

The expectations of non-disabled people are that access needs are something to add onto an event if the organizers aren’t too busy, have excess budget (ya, right!), and it doesn’t make them change anything the important people–non-disabled people–think is a good idea. In practice that means most events and services are inaccessible. Overworked people with no money just don’t have the ability to do it, they say. The implication: there is important stuff to do, and this isn’t important.

But there’s expectations on the other side, too. When you tell me that an event will be accessible, or a service will be provided in a certain way, that lets me run it against my checklist to see if the accommodations are sufficient for my needs. I might count on them for my participation. In this case, I was counting on the inductive loop at the Broadway show and the ability of a CART captioner (which I even arranged) to join a session. The Broadway show specifically mentioned the loop in the context of disability access, while the meeting session did not talk about access at all–but also I didn’t see a need for them to do so, as having a hybrid event let me arrange my own access, knowing that this setup would work fine for me.

But when those expectations aren’t met, that means I showed up in a place where I was denied participation.

In neither case were the organizers or staff intentionally trying to exclude me. They are good people, with good intents. In the case of the Broadway show, I have no idea why the loop didn’t work (Was it a temporary issue? Did the theater lack the basic equipment to check it? Was it left off a checklist of things to verify before each show?). They thought about accessibility, but apparently this could be checked off once they did it. The meeting session was an event where nobody probably thought about accessibility, and because I don’t look disabled, the people putting on the event didn’t think they needed to accommodate anyone. This is a fallacy–any time you have 4 or 5 people in a room, you probably have a disabled person in that room (13% of the USA population is disabled, so in a group of four people, you have about a 50% chance of a disabled person being in the group), and this meeting was much larger than four people! You can’t look at a list of attendees, even if you know all of them, and know, “Nobody I serve will need an accommodations.”

Disability Accommodations are Invisible

A lot of accommodations are invisible to everyone but the disabled person who needs them, unless the disabled person mentions their absence. For instance, nobody thinks twice about a small step to enter a business, unless they personally use a wheelchair (or are exceptionally in tune with the ideas of accessibility). And if that step was removed, unless people knew why, most people wouldn’t give it a second thought, and certainly wouldn’t see it as access!

I’d add that someone without an obvious physical disability mentioned the step to a business as an accessibility issue, there would be one of two responses:

1. None of our customers have an issue with the step, so why should we remove it?
2. We don’t have to make this accessible, because <reasons>.

Seriously, the second one is a really common reaction to suggestions that some place be made more accessible–people are usually more aware of why they don’t need to be accessible than what accessibility actually looks like! I can think of two examples that make this stand out:

First, I was working in the computer security field. I needed my office to have a uniquely-keyed door to limit access, to meet some security requirements imposed upon me. So I had the organization’s locksmith come and add a lock to the door. That involved replacing the door knob, a typical round knob as exists on most USA doors, and this locksmith replaced it with a lever-type handle with a high security lock. The lever-type handle of course can be used easier by people with some types of mobility difficulties, and is generally more accessible. So, I saw it as a win for accessibility–sure, only one office door, in a building full of doors, but it’s a start! He then told me that it’s stupid that any new doorknob he puts on a door has to be accessible. He didn’t see any potential user of the doors he worked on as a disabled person. We don’t exist in the wild! Nor would any disabled person ever visit an office of an employee in that building, apparently.

A second example was when I was a leader at a local church. I remember us moving into a new (to us) building, a beautiful historic church building. I noted that there was a lot of stairs to get into the building, so we should build a ramp. The pastor said, “The good thing is we don’t have to, this is a historic building so it has some protections from needing to do that, and we’re a religious organization so the ADA doesn’t apply to us.” He actually saw this as a good thing. The mission of the church was to serve the community and welcome the people of the community. In fact, we usually kept the church unlocked so long as someone on leadership was inside, so that people in the community could come and pray, get advice, etc. But apparently only if you are able-bodied. I left the church not long after this.

What Should You Do?

First, let people know what to expect. The more I know about the space and what goes on in the space, the more I know not only whether I’ll need accommodations or not, but what types of things might need to be accommodated. I have a list of 5 pages of of things that I might need accommodations around, but most of them don’t apply to most events. In reality, for most events, I only need one or two minor accommodations. But I can’t know that if I don’t know what to expect.

Second, when you give people information about spaces, where it will be, when it will be, etc, stick to it. If an event is hybrid, don’t change it to in-person-only at last minute. If it’s going to be in a certain type of room, don’t just move it without ensuring that everyone is still able to participate. This is particularly important when you’re talking about accessibility. If you say certain things will exist, like an inductive hearing loop, a ramp to gain access to the building, etc, that needs to happen! A particularly large offender of this is around masking–some people with impaired immune systems make judgements on their ability to attend an in-person event based on whether or not others will be masking. If you haven’t updated your website since the COVID pandemic started, now is the time to take a look and make sure the things you said you were doing back then for COVID are either still being done–or fix the website. That way you won’t get angry people when they show up expecting an event where people will wear a mask–and finding out they aren’t.

If you’re planning an event, Sins Invalid has a short webpage about creating accessible events.