A recent article in the New York Times highlighted a paid advertising campaign being pushed by agencies in 30 states that work with employment, health and human services aimed at citizens with disabilities (thanks to my friend Lindsay for passing it along!).
With an estimated $4 million budget, and hoping to raise $10 million for services, the ads are markedly different from traditional PSAs. Rather than moralizing, they use the humor of “normal” people’s eccentricities to argue that companies already hire people with various differences or disadvantages – so why not hire someone with a disability? There’s an emphasis on rejecting labels or stereotypes, as evidenced by the campaign’s website, Think Beyond the Label. The spots themselves show individuals including a girl who is “Pattern Deficient,” as well as a dancing man who is “Rhythm Impaired,” who are already hired and considered basically “normal. A television ad runs as follows:
a worker in a wheelchair points out her colleagues who “you could label as ‘different.’ ” Among them are a woman dressed in a nightmare wardrobe of clashing patterns, who is “fashion deficient”; a klutzy young man at the copier, who is “copy incapable”; and a shouting man who suffers from “volume control syndrome.”
The punch line of the commercial is that the worker in the wheelchair is different, too: Her skills at a basic office function are so bad that she is labeled “coffee-making impaired.”
The message, it seems, is one of tolerance – everyone is different in their own way, and we must accept others differences as potentially enriching (and at least irrelevant). The spots are aimed at HR professionals, managers, and other (presumably able-bodied) people with the power to influence hiring decisions. Disability, the spots imply, is just another quirky difference.
Though the ads may do a good job of cracking through public ignorance of the employment issues often faced by people with disabilities, and they have gotten positive responses from people with disabilities involved with the campaign, I doubt their potential to ameliorate workplace conditions. By placing disability on a level with various quirks, the realities of disability as a lived experience is erased. How will a hiring manager inspired by this campaign react when they realize that they hired someone who will need significant accommodations to succeed in the workplace? The question of ability or needs is conspicuously absent from the campaign, evidencing the desire to move beyond “labels” but not to address real physical or social challenges. Think Beyond the Label describes itself as “committed to making the business case for employing people with disabilities” – this is really similar to the dominant discourse on web accessibility (it can optimize your search engine results and bring new customers!). Where is the social justice case? The moral argument? The rights-based realities of the ADA and other legislation?
Plus, the ad can easily be read in reverse – rather than “people with disabilities are just different, like everyone else,” it could be seen to be asserting that the girl in mis-matched clothing is “disabled” – a move that minimizes the experience and voices of those who do face challenges due to disability. As Eva recently wrote about her experience being told “everyone’s retarded in their own way” – wow. There’s a sympathy toward disability in both instances, but the expression just doesn’t quite connect.
The commercial is set to run during most of the high-profile Sunday morning news shows, the web ads will appear at CNN.com, ESPN.com and WSJ.com, and the print ads will be in The Wall Street Journal, Time, and HR Magazine among other places. I’ll be keeping an eye out, and if you happen to come across one of these, I’d love it if you could send me a screenshot/video/etc!
P.S. The title is reference to Avenue Q song “Everyone’s a little bit racist” – not a serious question.
Today, I’m stepping outside my usual zone a little bit and ruminating on television and celebrity at Anne Helen Petersen’s fantastic blog, Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style.
I’ve been a fan of The Hills since the beginning – though my viewing has dropped off lately – and after rewatching some early seasons, I suggest that Heidi can be read as a tragic character. With the benefit of hindsight, and the inundation of media coverage of Heidi and Spencer, her transformations over the past few years (including her recent extensive plastic surgery) take on a more sinister cast. I’m not wedded to this idea – it’s still floating around while I make sense of it, and this blog post is a start.
Check it out!
Just a quick post today – I’m dying to read Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s book, Staring: How We Look but couldn’t find a way to work it into the prelims reading lists that dominate my free time right now. Until I get around to reading it, though, this video is a nice introduction.* Would be great for teaching, but is also just a well-done blurb on the issue.
*Unfortunately, it is not part of YouTube’s attempted captioning program, and doesn’t have any captions of its own.
Just a quick hit to say happy birthday to Louis Braille and the written system he pioneered. There are a number of articles out there lately focused on how e-readers are supplanting Braille. E-readers, Kindles and screenreaders for the web are all exciting and useful technologies, and from a universal design standpoint, they do a lot of good crossover work as both assistive devices for people with visual impairments and as enhancing technologies for those with vision.
But, as is pointed out in FWD’s link round-up, these technologies are only useful for visually impaired people with normal hearing abilities. Even more troubling, from some research I did on screenreader technology a few years ago, these audio technologies are difficult to learn, synthesized speech is still imperfect, and the temporal element of having written material read aurally means that progress and comprehension can be very slow. Thus, a number of people still prefer screenreaders that create Braille output – it can be skimmed, revisited, and stored much more easily than audio formats.
So, hooray for Braille and ongoing advances in making the written word available to all! Blogging will continue to be light around here, as I’m travelling more in January, so here’s a thematically appropriate web comic from XKCD to wrap things up!
Last night, BBC America began airing Britain’s Missing Top Model, prompting a wave of media attention on this side of the pond. Focusing on eight women with disabilities who aspire to be models, and seemingly based on the international hit America’s Next Top Model format, the series originally aired in the summer of 2008 on BBC 3.
A lot of press on this show, in 2008 and today, has focused on the potentially inspiring element of the competition. Presenting disabled women as sexually desirable is still a rarity in most television and mass media, and thus the self-confidence, beauty, and audacity of the contestants has been applauded. Yet, no coverage seems untroubled by the premise of the show. Questions of exploitation, ongoing discrimination, and possible offensive content have been raised both in 2008 and again this week.
In TIME’s 2008 coverage, for instance, the author points out that the guaranteed modelling contract associated with Top Model programs is notably absent, as the winner merely got the chance to be considered by an agency. And Liz Carr, of BBC’s Ouch! radio program, adds
I’m not sure that seeing disabled women prance around in lingerie and having their bodies objectified is the best way to change representation.
In the transition to American cable television, The New York Times, online newsmagazine Salon and Gawker blog Jezebel have taken up the contradictions and mixed messages in the program. NYT gets off on the wrong foot entirely, claiming modeling as the “last bastion of prejudice” in which people are discriminated against because of their looks. Of course, many people including those with disabilities do face discrimination and/or harassment because of their appearance in many walks of life. Of course, modeling is an industry based on upholding standards of beauty, but even the Grey Lady recognizes that the contestants of BMTM are more conventional than not. Young, thin, white and confident, these women very nearly meet conventional standards of beauty, as Kate Harding snarks in Salon – “Now it’s just about the 100 or so demerits the show deserves for sexism, exploitation, cluelessness, condescension, etc. — and I feel perfectly confident docking those points without having seen the show.” Jezebel’s pre-show coverage and later review have the same takeaway – thin is still in!
Concerns about exploitation of the models run high in the NYT, as the show “makes a spectacle of their hunger for acceptance.” Reality TV is villianized, of course, for its reliance on highlighting the insecurities of participants, and a paternalistic thread runs through the article. Harding, as well, insinuates that the show designs challenges to demoralize each contestant in turn – a tactic that traditional Top Model has always used, as well.
A final controversy centers on the inclusion of women with invisible disabilities, including two deaf women. The judges, and media coverage of the show, can’t decide whether a disability that is not noticeable in a photograph “counts” toward their stated mission of finding a model with a disability to celebrate. In such concerns, it’s hard not to think of Heather Kuzmich, a contestant on cycle 9 of America’s Next Top Model who was open about her Asperger’s.
I haven’t seen Britain’s Missing Top Model yet – it’s on the DVR! and I love shows about models! – but I’m curious about how these intersections of disability, gender, beauty, and fashion will play out. And, I’d add, the intersection of British television and culture with American audiences looks to be another possible site of controversy. Though none of the above sources mention it, the cultural environment around BMTM is quite different from the American media landscape. Produced by a public service broadcaster (BBC 3) with a mandate regarding inclusion, it seems unlikely that exploitation or fetishism is the primary motivation behind the show. Furthermore, from its online presence on the BBC site, BMTM prominently links to Ouch!, “the BBC’s disability website.” Ouch! has forums, a blog and podcasts – it’s an integrated part of the media landscape in a way that disability certainly isn’t by American networks. The UK has its own vibrant history of disability theory and activism, as well, and I can’t help but be interested in the cultural differences that may shape reception of this show in the US, under a different set of discourses and expectations around disability.
Yesterday, Google announced that it would deploying several new options for increasing the number and quality of closed captioned videos on the site. The New York Times reported on this as a first step to making videos available to deaf and hearing-impaired audiences, but it seems clear that there are a lot of potential beneficiaries – foreign language audiences (captions can be translated to 51 languages), those of us who can’t turn on the speakers at work, and anyone who wants to search the verbal content of a video.
So, how are they doing it? First, speech-to-text technology currently used by Google Voice is being applied to a small number of videos on the site (largely educational content) to produce captions automatically.
“Because the tools are not perfect, we want to make sure that we get feedback from the video owners and the viewers before we roll it out for the whole world,” Mr. Harrenstien said. “Sometimes the auto-captions are good. Sometimes they are not great, but they are better than nothing if you are hearing-impaired or don’t know the language.”
Presumably, if this works, speech-to-text will be rolled out more broadly. For now, you can take a look at how this works below. To see the captions, Google/YouTube explains – “Click on the menu button at the bottom right of the video player, then click CC and the arrow to its left, then click the new “Transcribe Audio” button.” I’ve picked a clip of PBS’s upcoming series This Emotional Life, focusing on Asperger’s.
Obviously, it’s not perfect – “Asperger’s syndrome” is transcribed as “Mister Gerson” – so I hope that speech-to-text improves before this initial stage is extended to other videos. This, however, leads to the second option that Google/YouTube have made available, which is to provide your own captions for videos you upload.
Now, after you upload a video, you can also upload a text file – YouTube will combine the video and the text to create captions. Through “auto-timing,” YouTube will match a transcript (a file with only verbal content) to the video using speech recognition, or will match a caption file (which includes time codes for the text to appear) to the video. The help file on this seems fairly clear, and also includes tips like including bracketed information about non-verbal sounds [whistling], or using >> to indicate changing speakers inthe captions.
I gave it a try – not the easiest experience. They weren’t kidding when they said that clear speech works best, as my transcript file (no time code) was not able to be matched and displayed as captions. People singing to cats didn’t translate well. Thus, to get a captioned video, I had to try the old fashioned way, creating a .sub file with time codes. This quickly got me in a bit over my head – while I could do it, given the time, there’s a reason most people don’t caption their YouTube videos. It’s time intensive, there’s a learning curve involved, and the results may not seem important enough to justify the work.
This, of course, is exactly why forays into speech-to-text and auto-timing are so exciting. If captions could be created automatically, or from a simple text file, captions on user-created video would certainly become more common and make the world more accessible. While the tools as they are today aren’t anywhere near perfect, it’s certainly a first step in creating automatic accessibility features for participatory media.
As someone who studies accessibility and internet media, I’m constantly torn between getting excited about social/participatory media and being disappointed in their access options. This WordPress blog I’m using is notoriously terrible in its implementation of image alt text, for instance. Blogging has given so many people an outlet to write and connect, but if they want to make a blog accessible, it takes additional research and effort. Attempts to build accessibility features in automatically are, in my opinion, game-changers when they’re done well. I’ll withhold judgment on this YouTube move for now – it has potential – but I’ll be watching to see whether it develops .
Today’s my birthday, and I’m taking a break from blogging (and reading, and writing, and teaching and most other parts of my usual routine!).
But, it happens that I share a birthday with Chally, a fantastic (and prolific) Australian blogger who writes about disability issues, feminism, sex ed, and more. In the spirit of the day, check out some of her work from all around the internet:
At FWD/Forward
At Zero at the Bone
At Feministe
Artie in his chair
Fox’s hit show Glee has been receiving a lot of media attention – about its May premiere, its diverse (and/or stereotypical) characters, its dark humor, and of course its musical numbers. This week, however, as Glee puts the members of the Glee Club into Artie’s shoes (and wheels), it faces criticism for casting an able-bodied actor in one of the few visible PWD roles on network television.
While many media outlets are emphasizing the charms of Kevin McHale and the show generally, USA Today presented an alternate take. Talking to members of a small union of actors with disabilities, including Chill Mitchell, the author argues that given the reach of television, actors with disabilities need the opportunity to perform in roles that represent their lived experience. Glee’s executive producer Brad Falchuk described the casting decision as based on charisma, and singing and dancing skills, implying that actors with disabilities who auditioned were simply not good enough – a claim that the Media Access Office and working actors and producers dispute.
Yet, the issues of “crip drag” involved in Artie’s casting are not the only concerning element of the episode. For one thing, Glee missed an opportunity to showcase the fascinating world of wheelchair dancing. In this behind the scenes segment, we see the cast learning their wheelchair routine:
In the New York Post’s coverage of “Wheels,” the falsity of the performance is highlighted.
Let’s get one thing straight: Kevin McHale, who plays wheelchair-bound underdog Artie Abrams on “Glee,” can really dance.
The implication that he can “really dance” suggests that PWD cannot, and would merely be “pretending” to dance, while his charisma and talents are prioritized, and he only “pretends” to be disabled. Echoing Falchuk’s words, talent is tied to able-bodiedness, and the accomplishments and differences of PWD are discarded.
An integrated dance group
Wheelchair dancing and integrated dance troupes (with dancers both in and out of chairs) have a long, and beautiful history. There are numerous troupes, choreographers, and performers who specialize in dance with chairs, and who no doubt could have created something truly remarkable and resonant for the group’s performance. For thoughts on the creativity and strength that are part of wheelchair and integrated dance performance, check out Wheelchair Dancer and her links to other dance groups.
In addition to the dancing, however, this episode of Glee raises a lot of interesting questions about access, introduces the character of Becky (a jump rope savant who also has Down Syndrome), and puts its able-bodied characters in wheelchairs for a few hours a day. I was excited about the potential of the first two plots, but deeply nervous about the play-acting with disability. These exercises have a long history, and are well-intentioned, but frequently misfire by convincing able-bodied users that they now completely understand the challenges of PWD. Just as caring for an egg baby can’t replicate caring for a live infant, a few hours and mistakes can’t replicate a life of experiences and struggles. For more of my thoughts on Glee, head over to Antenna, where I’ll be blogging about it again later today!
Representations of disability on television are fairly rare (and usually seem to be male – which is another post), and it is even rarer for these parts to be played by an actor with a disability. As Anna at FWD/Forward notes, this “crip drag” can make for problematic representations and can further exclude disabled actors. When a character with a disability is played by an actor with a disability, it is worthy of some attention, and thus I offer a clip of Brothers – a FOX sitcom almost certainly not long for this world.
Darryl “Chill” Mitchell was a comic actor in the 1990s (you may remember him from Veronica’s Closet, Galaxy Quest or as the teacher in the film 10 Things I Hate About You) who was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident in 2001. Since then, he has used a wheelchair in both his personal and professional life, first on Ed and now on Brothers. The show focuses on Mitchell, his parents, and his brother (Michael Strahan), who is a former NFL star and whom Michell’s character blames for his accident.
While I don’t want to exaggerate the possible causality here, the fact that his character’s disability is treated as a fact of life that can be joked about is a welcome antidote to common storylines of disability as tragedy or inspiration for able-bodied characters, and may be tied to the lived experience Mitchell brings to the role. Certainly, he is aware of the risks and possible rewards involved in the representation of an African-American man with a disability on network TV, telling The Atlantan:
“And I’m not only part of an African-American family, I’m a person who uses a wheelchair. I’m not pitching for one community. I’m pitching for two. This isn’t just a TV show. It’s a movement.”
Brothers, however, has had terrible ratings, is not particularly funny, and is rumored to be already quietly canceled by FOX.
Turning to a brother on a different low-budget series, Make It or Break It on ABC Family focuses on four teenage girls who are also elite gymnasts. Our protagonist, Emily, has a younger brother who uses a wheelchair. Yet, Brian’s health is never discussed, and he seems to be a peripheral character within the series and his own family, dominated as it is by his sister’s gymnastics, his mother’s sexuality, and the family’s poverty. In fact, Brian seems to perpetuate the representation of PWD as saintly characters who take care of and inspire those around them. So far, Brian is practically a contemporary Tiny Tim, preserving his family’s optimism in the face of other challenges and minimizing his own needs. For whatever it’s worth, Brian is not played by an actor with disabilities. And, of course, this tween-focused dramedy is far from well-written on any level.
Yet, the contrast between Brothers and Make It or Break It is notable for their very different approaches to fairly similar stories of sibling, elite athletics and disability. Apart from the presentations of brothers with disabilities, I find their athletic siblings an interesting counterpoint. To some extent, the same contrast between athletics and disability is present in Friday Night Lights, as well. Why are disabled bodies invoked in these series, in particular? One possibility is that these characters are an attempt to to humanize their physically impressive siblings, bringing them “down to earth” from elite athletics by showing interactions with “pitiable” or “vulnerable” people with disabilities. Related to this, the contrast in bodily representation seems to underscore the skills of the non-disabled athletes by presenting them in connection with a perceived Other; Emily leaps across the uneven bars at nationals and Brian watches her on television while sitting in his chair, at home. Make It or Break It will be back for another season this winter – let’s hope that the characterization of Brian can take a page from Chill and present a somewhat less cliched family dynamic around disability.
For more reading on disability in the media (because I certainly won’t post often enough to keep you up to date!) the series of posts on disability in media and popular culture at FWD/Forward has been fascinating reading lately. I was particularly impressed with Ouyang Dan’s post on House, as well as posts on Torchwood and Joan of Arcadia, and heartily recommend the series and the blog.
Recently I’ve been thinking about social networks as a space for self-representation and/or artistic expression. This is largely a result of taking an art history and new media course this semester, and trying to figure out how to bring in media studies and my own interests. But, I’ve found Flickr to be a really interesting place to start thinking about PWD using online services and digital media to create art/representation and to share it in a pseudo-gallery space.
Several Flickr groups have been interesting jumping-off points – Blind Photographers, for instance, is a small group, but one that explicitly asks “How does having a different visual experience affect our photography?” !Rock That Disability! is another interesting (and much larger) group. Photos here include both those taken by PWD and those taken of PWD and assistive devices. The group also seems to have an active community forming. And, of course, there are tons of gorgeous, interesting and moving photos to browse through. Wheelchairs, Disability Arts Around the Globe and Disability History all also offer some interesting images and communities. The photo with this post is from the Disability History pool, posted by the Library of Congress, and depicts a turn-of-the-century woman using a dictaphone – in a written caption, she’s identified as a “blind stenographer.” Just another reminder of how assistive devices have always been with us and served both PWD and others who needed dictation machinery.