Episode 20: Contra* Technology with Liz Ellcessor

Introduction:

Welcome to Contra*: the podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing.

I’m your host, Aimi Hamraie .  I am a professor at Vanderbilt University, a designer and design researcher, and the director of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-institution collaborative focused on disability, technology, and critical theory.  Members of the lab collaborate on a number of projects focused on hacking ableism, speaking back to inaccessible public infrastructures, and redesigning the methods of participatory design—all using a disability culture framework. This podcast provides a window into the kinds of discussions we have within the lab, as well as the conversations we are interested in putting into motion. So in coming episodes, you’ll also hear from myself and the other designers and researchers in the lab, and we encourage you to get in touch with us via our website, www.mapping-access.com or on Twitter at @CriticalDesignL

How can disability culture inform our ways of thinking about communication technologies and digital spaces? In this episode of Contra*, I talk to media scholar Liz Ellcessor about the politics of technological design.

Interview:

Aimi Hamraie: I'm so excited to welcome Liz Ellcessor to the podcast. Liz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. She's the author of the book Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation, which was published by NYU Press. And this is a really important book because it was the first cultural analysis of web and digital media accessibility for people with disabilities.

Aimi Hamraie: And Liz is also the co-editor of the book Disability Media Studies, and is doing work now on emergency media and infrastructure. So welcome, Liz.

Liz Ellcessor: Yes, thank you. I'm so excited to be here and talk about these things with you, because as we've discussed, we're sort of two sides of the same coin. You talk about the real world and I talk about the digital world.

Aimi Hamraie: Well thank you, and I also think the digital is very much part of the real world, and that's something I hope we can discuss as well. So as you may know if you've listened to other episodes of the podcast, really the purpose of this is to capture the conversations that we're already having about disability, design, technology, media, et cetera, that are thinking about accessibility in a critical way. And are really going beyond the kind of treatment of accessibility as a sort of common sense idea, which is a very frequent trope in the way that accessibility is marketed, for example to businesses and stuff like that. And bringing the tools of cultural analysis to thinking about accessibility differently.

Aimi Hamraie: And so I'm really excited to talk to you about this, because I think that you're offering us a lot of different tools and really drawing on various fields of knowledge to think about these questions, in a way that disability activists and scholars may not even be aware of that, like, these tools exist.

Aimi Hamraie: So one thing that maybe we can just start out by talking about in a broad way is, how are you thinking about the relationship between accessibility, design, and disability politics?

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, I mean, I like that that's your beginning question because that is like, the biggest question. But I think that it's an interesting thing to think about, because when I was working on Restricted Access I was working from a sort of media studies and science and technology studies approach. I was doing a lot of archival work, I was reading a lot of legal documents, I was talking to people who had been involved with legal and technological processes.

Liz Ellcessor: And we really quickly fell into these sort of circuitous understandings of accessibility. And one person who shall remain nameless told me that something is accessible if it meets the accessibility standards. Which, yes. But also that's not helpful, that's not practical, that doesn't speak outside of this very bureaucratic context.

Liz Ellcessor: And one of the things that then was so interesting with the second half of that project was when I was looking at the way that disabled bloggers and social media campaigns, and these sort of ground up understandings of access from a disability culture or disability politics perspective... They frame things very differently. Less bureaucratically, less in terms of preexisting understandings of what something should be. And what struck me as most interesting about it was the degree to which they framed it, culturally or affectively, as a matter of feeling or as a matter of belonging, or as a matter of some kind of felt experience as being welcome.

Liz Ellcessor: And that I thought was really provocative in terms of pushing back on some of the bureaucratic understandings of what access could be. Because, I fleshed it out in the book in terms of what I call cultural accessibility, this idea that if something is going to be accessible not just in a sort of bare-bones, functional way, then it needs to be accessible in a way that feels resonant and inclusive and that features collaboration and participation, rather than the sort of top down idea that we design something accessibly for these people who aren't already part of the design process.

Liz Ellcessor: So that was, I think, a really important shift in terms of how that book understands accessibility, because it very much starts in the bureaucratic and then tears that down.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, thank you. So it sounds like you're giving us a way to think about the idea that accessibility has to go beyond the code. And I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about what it is about codes and standards that is so limiting. You mentioned that they're bureaucratic, but maybe we can kind of like, unpack that a little bit too, for people who may not be familiar with what codes are?

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, a lot of my work was starting in the world of web accessibility, which really got its legs in HTML markup language, right? How do we make HTML accessible for screen readers, in particular? And later for other kinds of assistive technology.

Liz Ellcessor: And as a result they tended to be trying to codify or write down, if not a checklist, at least a set of best practices for practitioners. Like, "Oh, you should do ABCD." And this only becomes stronger when you start seeing accessibility for technology written into legal structures. Legal structures were looking for something was enforceable, right? Where you could say, "Yes, this meets criteria, no, this doesn't meet criteria."

Liz Ellcessor: And so one great example is alternate text for images, images should have alternate texts that provide a description of either their content or their purpose so that someone who's using a screen reader, or who has a browser that doesn't load images or a terrible internet connection, right? There are all kinds of reasons people use alt-text. Will know what's in the image. But the sort of checklist standard for that is, images have alt-text.

Liz Ellcessor: Now alt-text can be really bad. I walked some students through this recently, we were looking at a website from the Smithsonian and they had a picture with the alt-text, "Vintage listeners." Do you even know what I'm saying? No, that doesn't bring an image to mind, that doesn't tell you what it's for, that doesn't tell you what's in there. And these are the kind of things that standards are really bad at capturing, like, "Alt-text must be meaningful and useful," is a much harder standard when we start talking about enforcement.

Liz Ellcessor: And so when we want something to be accessible in a sort of culturally effective way, then we're talking about these details. You know, my students rewrote that as, "Black and white 1920s photo of two people listening to a radio," which is much better than, "Vintage listeners." But from a standards perspective those are exactly the same.

Aimi Hamraie: So I mean, I guess if we're thinking about what more meaningful cultural practices would be, are there better standards to be set for alt-text? Or is it a matter of kind of having like, best practices or being part of disability culture and learning better practices? Or you know, like, how do we do accountability around that?

Liz Ellcessor: Well one of the things that I always come back to with digital accessibility in particular is that nobody has any education in it. I taught a six week course on digital accessibility recently, and one of the things that I included was a survey from Web Accessibility in Mind, which is a great accessibility sort of consulting and resource organization. 93% of people who do this professionally have no educational background in it, which is enormous, right? That's everybody.

Liz Ellcessor: And that means that people are learning on the job, they're learning from the standards or they're learning from a community of other practitioners, and they aren't always learning it in a context that talks about disability culture or that explains the difference between good alt-text and bad alt-text. And this is something that may get to on their own or they may not.

Liz Ellcessor: So I think it's a huge sort of educational gap, in that this is something that, particularly for computer science students, is still just absent from the curriculum and maybe you pick it up later. Whereas you could easily imagine a world in which it is part of the curriculum. If you do sort of develop accessibility websites or mobile apps it's part of everything you're doing, it's part of your design layout, it's part of your functionality, it's part of your hover text, right? It's part of everything you're doing. If you don't know that then you don't do any of it and you have to do it later, and that's where we get into sort of discussions about retrofitting and expense.

Liz Ellcessor: If people had the background and the education and the conversations before they were asked to build something, then that might look different.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It makes me think about how our course management software at Vanderbilt, which is called Brightspace, it's actually... So we just got this two years ago, and it is way better than the ones that we had before. And one of the things I like about it is that any time you upload an image a little pop-up comes up that asks for alt-text.

Aimi Hamraie: But I always wonder, what do people do who don't even know what that is?

Liz Ellcessor: Why doesn't everything do that?

Aimi Hamraie: Right? Well yeah, why doesn't everything do that? But like, for people who've never heard of alt-text before it doesn't provide directions or even best practices, so how would they know the degree of detail and what kind of information would be beneficial and that kind of thing? We actually had, last year through the Center for Teaching, a series on accessibility in the classroom that I helped to organize with some people working at the Center for Teaching. And we would talk about image description, and even thought that popup existed for everyone in the university, most people in the workshop had never even noticed it before. So they kind of like, automatically just clicked through it instead of writing something there.

Aimi Hamraie: And so then we had to talk about kind of methods of image description and why we do it, and you know, what you need to have at the bare minimum in it, and what amount of interpretation or non-interpretation there should be and why, according to what theories, and all of these sorts of things. And it was a really important moment I think for a lot of people, especially folks who were in like, the humanities to think about how images are media and they're mediated, and the way that we describe them is also mediated. And that there's ideology kind of imbued in that.

Aimi Hamraie: But I was just like, so struck with how, even though the design of the technology asked you to do it, it didn't mean that people would do it or would do it effectively, or even know where to go and check to see if an alt-text was attached to an image.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, absolutely. I have mixed feelings about this too, because I feel like on the one hand of course we should all be attempting to make things as accessible as we possibly can, and on the other hand I recognize that this is my research area and thus I know a lot more about it than my colleagues in chemistry. And I bristle at the way that this gets pushed onto everyone to somehow learn about and do, rather than hiring people to be really good at it.

Liz Ellcessor: Accessibility is not just a matter of, you know, checking the right boxes. We could have universities actually putting resources into hiring more people to do this on scale, right? Have someone who's in charge of all the alt-text for three or four departments, rather than asking 50 people to learn how to do it. And some of them will and some of them won't.

Liz Ellcessor: So I'm encouraged, actually, one of the things we have here at UVA is a senior staff person at the provost level in charge of academic accessibility. So she's actually overseeing a lot of these resources in terms of how the library and the Center for Disability Access, and departmental level initiatives are making materials accessible, so that it doesn't just have to happen on this sort of individual level where results are really unpredictable.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that kind of reminds me of conversations around ASL as well, that you know, of course we all should be learning ASL and normalizing ASL as a language of academia in the US. But if we were all to DIY interpretation in a staff meeting or something like that-

Liz Ellcessor: It would not go well.

Aimi Hamraie: No, that would not be accessibility to deaf people in that space, unless we were all like, super good at academic ASL. And so there are these real limits to sort of like, the crowdsourcing model of information accessibility. This is something that comes up in my mapping access project too, where it's like, you got a bunch of people to look at accessibility features. The quality of that data varies very widely depending on who does it and how much time they put into it, and things like that.

Aimi Hamraie: So it really complicates the declarations of something just being accessible because it meets the standard, because there are so many qualitative dimensions to what that means.

Liz Ellcessor: And I think it's just important too to recognize that accessibility, whether in technology or media or other contexts, is a skill and is something that should be paid for and should be taught and should be encouraged. It's not just an extra thing that we'll do if we remember, it has value. And that's something that I think is really important in how we talk about it, because while we want to encourage broadly accessible practices we also want to encourage recognition of people who actually have those skills and have that expertise, rather than sort of dismissing what they do as somehow unimportant.

Aimi Hamraie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. And bringing in labor issues to make sure that people are compensated for their work. Louise Hickman is doing this awesome project on people who do transcription labor, basically like CART and stuff like that, and the labor dimensions of that that are basically made invisible by the way the technology works as well, right? Like, a lot of the time it's someone in a remote location listening in and typing and [crosstalk 00:16:55]

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, television captioning works similarly. Yeah, that labor just gets sort of erased. And when people are doing really hard, skilled work they ought to be recognized.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, definitely. And it also means that the design elements of those technologies just kind of fall away, the way that decisions are made about how information gets transmitted and displayed, and like those kinds of things. So that's something that... it really interests me about media, because all of these things are so ubiquitous, kind of where you consume them on a daily basis. But sometimes they feel like they just appear there and they're kind of like, to use an STS term, the black box surrounding them isn't open. But there are like, tons of people in that box making all sorts of decisions, so...

Liz Ellcessor: Well I mean, and I've argued before that I think to some degree media industries are interested in promoting that sort of magical black box, and promoting the invisibility of access measures to mainstream audiences. I think there's a reason that captions are closed, that they are off until you turn them on. And that's because the industry still imagines the default viewer to be someone who is hearing and who is watching without captions. Captions are the exception and not the rule.

Liz Ellcessor: And I think that kind of making invisible of access is something that we see a lot in popular media in particular. Indie media contexts sometimes foreground it much more explicitly, but oftentimes access differences and access technologies are I think intentionally hard to see unless you're looking for them.

Aimi Hamraie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). There's a thing about how we design information to include or not include the possibility of captioning that's really interesting to me. Like, I recently gave a talk and the CART worker was in the room and was... There wasn't a separate projector. And so I was asked to make sure that when I designed my slides that the bottom quarter of the page didn't have any text or images on it. So kind of like, shift everything up a little bit, because that's where the CART appeared, the transcription appeared.

Aimi Hamraie: And I'd never really thought about that before, no one had ever told me to do that before. It was also only the second time I'd had CART that appeared on the same screen, so... But then it made me realize like, "Oh, there are probably all these other times that I should have known as a best practice to kind of shift the content in the PowerPoint." But it's kind of... it's things like that, and being able to be flexible also, that are design elements of sort of the everyday life of academia or anything else that uses PowerPoint. Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie: What are some other assumptions about accessibility that your work challenges?

Liz Ellcessor: Well I think one thing in terms of accessibility that I think my work pushes on is this idea that digital media makes life more accessibility. That digitization makes all kind of resources and information more accessibility on a broad level. And you hear this claim all the time, often from people who are totally unfamiliar with accessibility as a disability practice, but they're talking about it to mean, you know, things are more available or things are cheaper, right? Accessibility in those [inaudible 00:20:58]

Liz Ellcessor: And so one thing that I think a lot of my work on media culture in particular pushes on is that just because social media exists doesn't mean that it's accessible. Just because the Social Security Administration puts everything online doesn't mean that it's accessible. And sometimes we get into situations where new technologies not only don't include accessibility measures, but they either do away with old accessibility measures or they move further away from sort of universal design practices.

Liz Ellcessor: So you see this with like, the rise of streaming video that initially didn't carry captions even on television content that would have already been captioned, right? So here you have something that is more accessibility in a free availability sort of sense, but doesn't carry the captions that went with it in the first place.

Liz Ellcessor: Now that's improved over the past 10 years, but what I think you're seeing now as well, and one of the reasons I'm now looking at emergency, is that you're seeing this proliferation of smartphone apps in particular that deal with emergency situations or personal safety, or health concerns, and they do so within a very sort of neoliberal model of individual choice and benefit. They don't work within broader contexts of the imperatives for access in traditional emergency systems. They don't address accessibility concerns, oftentimes because they are very much figuring their audience as a white, middle to upper class sort of technology user, right? A disruptor.

Liz Ellcessor: And that makes me really nervous in the way that we see new things proliferating that essentially write access out of their mission entirely.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. What's an example of that?

Liz Ellcessor: So I mean, there are lots, but I think there are a number of apps that offer to do a sort of virtual escort services. They allow you to sort of push a button and they send a text message to a friend or a family member who can watch on a little map as you make your way home or something like that. So rather than have a friend walk you home from the bar you have your mom watch your little dot on the map.

Liz Ellcessor: Many of these are aimed at college students, I came up with that example because I'm working from that framework. But those apps often very much privilege someone who is walking at a normative pace. They route sort of a best route without considering accessibility, they often have alerts if you don't progress at the speed that it expects you to progress, right? So if you slow down they think maybe you're in trouble. Whereas, you know, if you have some sort of mobility impairment or if you have to take a different route because there are stairs blocking one direction and a ramp in the other, these apps often don't build that in at all. And especially when they're paid services, I think the tendency to write out access is even stronger.

Aimi Hamraie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, when we were developing a routing feature for the accessibility mapping project that I'm working on, which was like, weirdly much more complicated than I thought it was going to be, the interesting thing that came up, other than like, the coding part being really complicated, was that collecting data about movement speed and potential barriers and things like that, rightly so, opened up so many complex questions about the user. And you know, it's like, we may think of these things as like, disabled people and people adjacent to disability studies and stuff like that, but starting to explain that or translate that for kind of like, people who are just doing technical assistance on a project like that was really interesting. And then also figuring out who would be our prototypical disabled users, which opens up a whole other can of worms, you know?

Aimi Hamraie: So it would be interesting if there was like, a crip hackathon taking exactly these kinds of technologies that you're talking about and figuring out ways for them to actually be usable and inclusive. Because it sounds like what you're critiquing isn't the routing function, it's how the routing understands the human that's using the technology.

Liz Ellcessor: Absolutely. It's something that I've talked about elsewhere as being... The way that technological design often assumes a sort of preferred user, someone who is going to use it the way... often the way developers would use it. Who's going to have the same sort of cultural intuitions and bodily functions, and be able to sort of instantly understand and use the technology as intended.

Liz Ellcessor: And the reality is that that's only ever a subset of your technology users. Far more people are engaging in sort of negotiated use practices where they do some of what the designers intended and then find ways around the rest.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, definitely. And it would be interesting to think about how to capture data about people who work around the intention. That's something... Like, in disability geography that's something that gets discussed a lot in terms of built environments and whether they actually, like, constrain use, and what it looks like when disabled people subvert the intended use. So it would be interesting to think about an accessibility feature being one that collects that data and also then responds to it somehow.

Liz Ellcessor: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, absolutely. And I know that their... Best practices obviously involve doing user walk throughs with a variety of disabled users to see sort of what they do and what works and what doesn't. But those are not done by everyone, obviously. And user testing has some limitations in terms of who's available to perform testing, how it does and does not pay, again. And you know, oftentimes a lot of companies rely on a sort of small group of user testers to fill in for large populations, which may have diminishing results over time as those users in turn get used to the technology they're being asked to test.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that makes sense. And there's probably categories of users that are not even anticipated and included.

Liz Ellcessor: Oh, absolutely.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. I think a lot about how, you know, technological change can bring about accessibility barriers so quickly that sometimes these unanticipated things happen. Like presently, I can't really leave my house at night because the LED lighting everywhere gives me migraines. But it's like, you know, every streetlight, everything, like... And it's always worse at night, and so I just stay in my house.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, it makes you make decisions that... Yeah.

Aimi Hamraie: But I would wish that that could be different, because there's really no way around it, you know?

Liz Ellcessor: No, that's a big scale problem. That's hard to change.

Aimi Hamraie: Definitely like an infrastructural problem, that it's a result of trying to save energy and then it kind of has these other external implications.

Aimi Hamraie: I wonder if we could talk a little bit about some of the areas of overlap or difference between media and web accessibility and architectural accessibility? Kind of like, where you see them bleeding together or differentiating from each other?

Liz Ellcessor: So I think, as we've talked about before, sort of ideas of universal design are very foundational to the way that accessibility issues are talked about in both architecture and web design. The sort of argument that, "If you do this it will be better for everyone," are still very, very current. Within the web design field we definitely still do that.

Liz Ellcessor: I think it terms of differences, and I don't know as much about the architectural side so if I'm speaking out of turn correct me, but I do get the sense that there's a really vibrant community of people who do accessible tech development. They seem to be in sort of ongoing close conversation with one another. And I don't know to what degree that's the case within architectural contexts. If you have sort of a, essentially, subculture of accessibility practitioners, or if it's a bit more diffuse. So I don't know.

Aimi Hamraie: I think you're totally right about that. It's something that I think has been the case pretty much throughout the history of the development of universal design as well. Like, I was really surprised when I was working on my book to find out that the architects were really in conversation with the web accessibility people from the '80s going forward, because of all sorts of legal things and whatever. And they were borrowing a lot of ideas about usability from them. And also kind of like, taking a departure from architecture into interface and industrial design and stuff like that, because that was a place where it was easier to make an immediate impact than in the discipline of architecture.

Aimi Hamraie: And so, you know, there are like, tons of accessibility experts who work for the Department of Justice doing audits or working for architecture firms and things like that. But we could probably count all the ones that we know in a way that I feel like in tech, media, web accessibility kind of stuff it's way more ubiquitous and... at least the people I've talked to who teach in those areas, it's kind of taken for granted that accessibility is going to be a conversation. Whereas in architecture it's kind of more of an anomaly to go beyond the code and think about it as like, central to design practice.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah. And I think some of that also has to do with a legacy in web design in particular, where people were often self taught, particularly through the '90s. And some of those people who were self taught were people who didn't fit into educational systems very well, often in part due to disability. And so you have people who were coming to this sort of career as a way of continuing things that they cared about and finding a professional life without having to go through official channels. So there's that little bit of legacy as well.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, I love that. It's sort of like the un-disciplining of accessibility, or like, not tying it so directly, like in a gatekeeper-y kind of way, to a particular design discipline.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah. And that may be changing, it's much harder to become a developer with no credentialing now than it was 20 years ago. But I would hope that there's still some of that happening, that this still looks like a field where you might be able to make a difference in accessibility and cultural impact without necessarily fitting into preexisting, like you say, gatekeeping structures.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah. I would like to see more of that going forward, and I wonder what we could do, also, to kind of encourage sort of like... disability design knowledge outside of official channels. Because there's this way that we're all constantly designing things, whether we're conscious of it or not. And there's something that happens in those spaces that's very different than just following like, bureaucratic standards and stuff.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, definitely.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, I've probably... I can't remember if I've mentioned this in a previous podcast episode, but I have this fantasy of creating like a disability design summer school, where-

Liz Ellcessor: That would be [inaudible 00:34:51]

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, right? Like, we would all teach accessibility theory, disability studies kind of stuff to grad students in disability studies and in various design disciplines, and kind of like, create a space for having critical conversations around accessibility. And I feel like that could be a way to capture people, also, who are not part of kind of like traditional academic disciplines, or not cultured in them yet. So yeah.

Liz Ellcessor: Mm-hmm (affirmative), absolutely. And sort of thinking about the way that... from a sort of design perspective we're all, as you say, constantly designing things whether we think about it that way or not. But also thinking about sort of how we design something like an educational experience, you framed it as sort of summer school, right? And that's entirely different than saying like, "Oh we're going to do a semester long seminar." Right? Summer school carries all these other sort of fun ideas and different kinds of pedagogies. And I think that's important. And it think that's important to what you're saying, even though you didn't say it that way.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, I think it's important to like, break out of the academic kind of structure of knowledge reception and production. And also I feel like doing these things in a convivial space that is not graded and, you know, that kind of stuff is just really important.

Aimi Hamraie: It's also, I think of it as an alternative to the kind of like, quick hackathon, design charrette sort of model that is often criticized as not really engaging with communities or being of the communities that it's supposed to serve. So yeah, but that's something we should definitely talk more about if you are also interested.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, absolutely.

Aimi Hamraie: Cool. Maybe now we could... Well I have two sets of questions left. Do you think that your work speaks to media makers? And if so, in what ways? I was looking at the web version of your book and kind of like, archive you have. So yeah, any thoughts about how media makers might use your ideas?

Liz Ellcessor: That's interesting. And I think yes and no. I think a lot of my work is kind of too boring for media makers, and in that sense might speak a little bit better to people on the media policy side. So sort of... You know, I've had conversations with folks at the FCC, right? People who are engaged in media policy are often more interested in these kinds of questions about accessibility and access in general.

Liz Ellcessor: That said, I think... I have a really broad conception of media makers. So a lot of my students in the media department in particular often think that they want to go into the industry in some way. And so one of my goals has always been to say like, "Well the media industry is not one thing. The media industry is a whole bunch of different industries. And some of them are things that you aren't even looking at, like organizations that produce captions and subtitles. They hire, they have jobs. You will get to see things six months ahead of time. There are all of the kinds of advantages that you might think of in other kinds of like, post production work, you could be doing in an accessibility context."

Liz Ellcessor: I also think that there is an important conversation to be had about broadening conceptions of sort of media makers and media industry to include various forms of independent media. I talk a lot about web series, because that's one of my favorites. But you see that there are, you know, people who develop short form videos, people who are developing podcasts, who can intervene in media content and access much more nimbly than like, Disney can. And so there's definitely some dialog there.

Liz Ellcessor: I have podcasters and web series producers talk to my students periodically to say like, "Oh, here's how I went about making this piece of disability culture media, without necessarily participating in the larger structures of the media industry."

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, that makes sense. I had a conversation about this with Alice Wong when we recorded the episodes with her, kind of trying to figure out what makes a podcast accessible. And there are so many places that people have taken that. Like, there are podcasts that are filmed and transcribed and have ASL for example. So you don't just access them using like, Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or whatever, you actually like, go to YouTube to access the podcast. And that's a totally different way of even thinking about what the thing is, but it involves all these additional media production, post production kinds of skills.

Aimi Hamraie: And so as that experimentation becomes more prevalent we actually need more people who know things about accessibility to be able to do the work of producing accessibility podcasts.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, absolutely. And you see it happening in all kinds of other formats as well. A friend of mine, Aymar Jean Christian at Northwestern oversees a project called Open TV, which is fantastic. It's all of these sort of short form videos about sort of feminist, non-binary, queer people of color. And they have a couple of disability featured shows. And he and I have had conversations over the years about, "Well how do we make these accessible to the audiences that are being represented and that they are trying to reach?" So consider this my plug for Open TV, I love them.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, definitely. I'll make sure to include it in the show notes as well. Yeah, very cool.

Aimi Hamraie: So the last thing I wanted to talk about was your new work on emergency media, which I think is really exciting and it seems to be giving us tools for thinking about infrastructure studies and disability studies as well. So whatever you want to share about that.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, this is a work in progress so I could talk about it for hours and I might not get anywhere. But essentially what I'm working through right now are these questions of how accessibility becomes relevant in different ways in emergency. And some of this stems from earlier work where I just didn't talk about it. Because all of those ideas about sort of the invisibility of media accessibility apply to commercial mainstream media. They don't apply to emergency broadcasts.

Liz Ellcessor: So for instance, you don't need to have a live ASL interpreter for Law & Order episodes. You do need to have a live ASL interpreter when you're warning a local community to get out of the path of a hurricane, right? So you have these moments where suddenly disability and forms of access become visible in ways that they aren't normally.

Liz Ellcessor: And so on the one hand that's interesting, but on the other hand there's a way in which the very idea of emergency exists in opposition to sort of a normalcy. Like, normal life in interrupted by an emergency. And so then what does it mean to think about how, if we are not going to take for granted a state of normalcy, then maybe we can't take for granted a state of emergency. Maybe there are things about emergency that should actually be understood as constitutive of everyday life, that are actually much more diffuse experiences.

Liz Ellcessor: And sort of riffing on that, I've been thinking a lot about how emergency access is something that we think about as obviously important. Like, "Oh of course you need to be able to XYZ when someone's life is at stake." And a lot of that sort of taken for granted understanding relies on assumptions about what a default state of normalcy is, right? What's an emergency for one person may not be an emergency for another.

Liz Ellcessor: And my colleague here at UVA, Jennifer Rubenstein, has done some work on the idea of claims of emergency, like when someone claims an emergency is happening. That only functions in opposition to a perceived state of normalcy in which things are okay. If for instance you're then talking about populations for whom they experience chronic problems or chronic health conditions, then emergency no longer functions in the same way. I think one of the examples she talks about is sort of gun violence in major cities. Gun violence can't be figured as an emergency if it's the normal state of affairs.

Liz Ellcessor: Similarly I think you get into questions when we talk about ability, disability and health, what constitutes an emergency when a regular state of being may be one that requires more regular interventions, or that requires more regular assistance from others. These things don't fit well within taken for granted notions of emergency.

Liz Ellcessor: So on the one hand I'm looking at things that are self-evidently the media of emergency, like, 911 calls. But I'm also really thinking about this as a category that is a lot messier than common parlance would have us think. And that the divide between what is emergency media and what is regular media is not as cut-and-dry as it might appear. And I'm just talking, so feel free to cut me off.

Aimi Hamraie: Oh no, I love this. It seems to connect really well to conversations about slow violence and kind of like, climate change and things like that. And the differences between the sort of like, visible catastrophic forms of violence that occur and the kind of like, slow rise of sea levels until an island disappears. Like, that kind of thing. And what becomes legible or illegible within that.

Aimi Hamraie: And I can also imagine the way that someone may need to call 911 for example may... Someone's access needs may be de-legitimized by the everyday-ness of a condition. And there are not as many infrastructures set up to address people who are, for example, debilitated because of slow violence. And so yeah, that does-

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah. I mean, just the usage of emergency rooms in the United States sort of speaks to this, right? We don't have reliable healthcare services for acute conditions outside of the emergency room. So you have people for whom emergency room visits become a fact of life, become commonplace, because we don't have structures in place that allow for other kinds of treatment, right? Practitioner waits are long and urgent care centers only have some capacities. And so the emergency room becomes this other sort of interesting space that's being used for a wide variety of needs and services.

Aimi Hamraie: One thing I was thinking about earlier when you were describing your project is, what a sort of speculative design project might be that takes up some of these alternative emergencies, the ones that are less intelligible to the existing infrastructure? Kind of thinking about, like, are you familiar with Natalie Jeremijenko? She's an artist, she did this one project that was sort of like a community clinic, but you would show up and you would say like, "I have asthma," or something like that and she would prescribe the shutdown of the industrial factory down the street from your house. And so instead of doing like, an individual intervention it would be like, an infrastructural one.

Aimi Hamraie: So I wonder if there's something kind of fun and interesting to explore there, to shift the meaning of emergency?

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, I've been thinking about that as I work on this, because I'm looking at a wide variety of sort of communicative media structures. Like, I've been looking at text messages to 911 and I've been looking at Instagram hashtags from hurricane aftermath. And all these sort of escort apps that we talked about earlier. And so I've been thinking about what a sort of critical app intervention would look like, what would it look like to have something that allowed you to communicate about a felt emergency in a way that could be received by the people you were aiming it at, right? Which is not always the case. Or that could understand services in a different way. Yeah, I don't have answers to this yet, it's just, yes I am thinking about it.

Aimi Hamraie: Well it could be a fun thing to collaborate with the lab on if you're ever interested, because that's like, exactly the kind of stuff we do.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, I'll think about it. Because that would be a lot of fun in terms of what this would actually... What would it look like to do something that wasn't indebted to sort of current ideas of emergency?

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, totally. Well I'm so excited about this project and I'm looking forward to reading whatever comes out of it. Are you imagining that it's going to be a book?

Liz Ellcessor: It is working towards a book at this point. It's also spinning off into some other directions, I've published a little bit already about the Blue Light Emergency Phones on college campuses. [inaudible 00:50:20] as sort of an emergency architecture that was put in place to respond to very sort of specific ideas of threat, and it has had limited effectiveness.

Liz Ellcessor: I'm also writing about a number of public service announcements regarding text to 911. That's been really interesting because these audio or video announcements always emphasize that texting is helpful for people who are deaf or have communicative disabilities. And they say this almost exclusively right before saying that if you can hear you should make a voice call. And so there's this discursive positioning of texting as an assistive technology, where texting might otherwise be picked up as a sort of mainstream way of interacting. So the sort of discursive differences between the assistive and the mainstream is another interesting thing to see playing out here.

Liz Ellcessor: Most of this'll end up in the book, but yeah, some of it won't.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, fair. I was reading that piece on texting to 911, and I was just so curious about why those distinctions are made. Like, are there fewer resources devoted to receiving and responding to texts than to phone calls?

Liz Ellcessor: They're the same resources. Essentially a 911 dispatcher would receive a text just like they would receive a phone call. But there's an idea... There are a couple of assumptions running through there, first that voice communication will convey affect better. So if someone is crying or amped up in some way, or you know, sounds like they are having trouble breathing while they're speaking, that's all information that you wouldn't get from a text. Additionally, dispatchers are kind of trained to listen for background information, so while you're talking to a caller you might be able to hear like, is there traffic in the background? And again, this doesn't come through via text.

Liz Ellcessor: So I think part of it has to do with this legacy of how 911 dispatchers are trained, what they are trained to listen for, how they are trained to act. And additionally the sort of legacies of protocol, like, the question-answer structure is very much part of a call and a text chain. So while it might seem intuitive to be like, "Here's a geo-tagged photo of a house on fire, now you have enough information," the 911 operator is probably going to still walk through, you know, "What is your exact location, what is your emergency, fire, medical, or police?" Et cetera, et cetera. So there's a sort of inertia that's part of it, and actually moving to a structure where texts and images and video and alternate other material could be made actionable requires a much bigger change in what's already a really fragmented infrastructure.

Liz Ellcessor: One thing I didn't realize before doing this work is that 911 operates on a county-by-county level. So the capacities of response and the technological systems differ like, even if you're just driving down the highway.

Aimi Hamraie: Well it was so exciting to talk to you about all of this, and I hope we can continue the conversation.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, thank you for giving me a chance to talk about it, it's always fun.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, for sure. And let's be in touch about potential design project collaborations too.

Liz Ellcessor: Yeah, absolutely. We'll have summer school and then I'll build an app.

Aimi Hamraie: Yeah, definitely. We can make it one of the summer school projects.

Outro:

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