(1) BEA ACCESS ISSUE. Black comic book artist Tee Franklin, an invited Book Expo America panel participant who uses a wheelchair, arrived at today’s item and found there was no ramp allowing her to get on the platform with other panelists. She wrote a Twitter thread about the experience — it starts here:
I want to thank Kat from @ImageComics who reached out to the folks @Reed_POP and told them about what went down during this panel. The VP of ReedPop came down to the booth, apologized & asked how can they do better.
— TEE FRANKLIN IS WRITING. JOIN MY PATREON (@MizTeeFranklin) June 2, 2018
The moderator — who probably should have been aware in advance of the panelists and their backgrounds, who the panelist says knows her, and knows that she’s disabled — wasn’t paying attention and didn’t think as soon as they arrived to call the con management and say “we need a ramp in this room, STAT”.
Here’s one of the many tweets in support.
In the same vein as @intelligentwat, #BookCon2018: REMEMBER YOUR DISABLED PANELISTS. I’m at the Diversity in Graphic Novels panel and there was NO RAMP for Tee Franklin. She rightfully left due to this egregious oversight. Photo: panelists moving their chairs & mics to the floor pic.twitter.com/iEb5ZOFmGi
— Monique Laban (@endorphinique) June 2, 2018
Franklin adds that this is chronic occurrence:
I did THREE PANELS IN A ROW IN 2 DIFFERENT STATES & NONE had ramps!!!! I’m so tired. So quitting was NEEDED. Stop treating me like an afterthought. I am somebody!
— TEE FRANKLIN IS WRITING. JOIN MY PATREON (@MizTeeFranklin) June 2, 2018
(2) YOUNG PEOPLE RETURNS! James Davis Nicoll launches a new round of Young People by having them listen to a radio adaptation of Frederik Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under The World”.
Welcome to the first installment of Young People Listen to Old SFF, an experiment to see if old science fiction and fantasy radio shows aged better than old science fiction and fantasy. Unsurprisingly, my first selection is from that classic old time SF radio show, X Minus One.
To quote from my tor dot com piece: NBC’s Dimension X (1950-1951) and X Minus One (1955-1958) shared a network, some staff and initial source material for scripts. The first fifteen scripts for X Minus One were repurposed Dimension X scripts. Although the shows began by adapting stories from Astounding, X Minus One turned to more sophisticated material from Galaxy Magazine. I prefer X Minus One over Dimension X, so I’ve snagged two episodes from the first and none from the second. As I’ve said before, DX had the all time best ad lib: immediately after a character in one play made an impassioned plea for world peace, the news broadcasters broke in to announce the outbreak of the Korean War.
Among other things, the panel says this show failed the Bechdel Test!
(3) SILENCED, Heather Altfeld explains how “Every Day, Another Language Dies” at Lit Hub.
…Recent broadcast from the terrarium of sadness and destruction: it will take between ten and fourteen days from now for another of the world’s 6,900 languages to die out. So let’s say that today the last speaker of something somewhere is dying.
Exhibit A: Alban Michael. Out of the 7,700,000,000 people on earth, he was only one left who could speak Nuchatlaht. He lived near Nootka Island, he spoke to his parents in dreams, as there was no one left to speak to him. And then one year ago, he was gone, himself a dream, his language buried with him….
(4) POLITICS IN SF? YES. The Village Voice’s Carol Cooper is “Catching Up With the Next Generation of Sci-Fi Writers”.
…Surely in a community that attracts atheists, Wiccans, CIA agents, physicists, semioticians, libertines, libertarians, and unrepentant Trotskyites, one might anticipate a few political debates. More recent controversies have centered on fears that “political correctness” is taking the field too far away from the kinds of themes and characters that ruled SF in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Evidently, gay, non-white, and feminist themes and writers were getting too much attention in the 21st century, leaving straight, white protagonists with conservative plot lines unfairly ignored. But gathering to learn and play at regional and national conventions is one way these schisms in the larger SF community are addressed and eventually healed.
At Nebula Con, we discussed these questions of diversity in SF on panels like “How to Decolonize Your Fiction” and “Collaborations: More Than the Sum of Their Parts.” For the former, book agent DongWon Song asked a roundtable of non-white authors if it’s possible to write fiction free of the influence of Western imperialism and white supremacy. Bill Campbell, a middle-class, half-Jamaican author and publisher, described how after a white agent accidentally told him his work “wasn’t ghetto enough,” he reacted by self-publishing the satiric Koontown Killing Kaper, a gumshoe fantasy in which vampire crack babies are accused of murdering local rappers. Frustrated by the overly narrow expectations of existing publishers, he started Rosarium Publishing in 2013 as a home for multicultural SF, comics, nonfiction, and crime fiction that doesn’t pander to the “white gaze” and disregards stereotypical assumptions….
(5) THE COCKY CROWS. Here’s the Authors Guild update on “Cockygate” — “Authors Guild and RWA Prevail in Court Defending Authors in “Cocky” Trademark Dispute”.
The Authors Guild and the Romance Writers of America (RWA) joined forces in this case to defend the principle that no one should be able to own exclusive rights to use a common word in book or book series titles. In ruling against the author Faleena Hopkins, who claimed exclusive rights to “cocky” for romance titles, Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York, stated that he did not believe that Hopkins was likely to succeed on the merits.
…When Hopkins’ trademark registration was issued in April, Hopkins sent notices to multiple authors telling them to change the titles of their books and asked Amazon to take down all other cocky-titled romance books (not just series).
That is when the Authors Guild stepped in to defend the authors whose books were targeted. The Guild and the RWA separately requested that Amazon put the books back up, since the trademark claims were disputed, and it promptly complied. The two groups then jointly hired the Authors Guild’s outside counsel, Cowan Debaets Abrahams & Sheppard, to write a letter to Hopkins on behalf of Tara Crescent, author of another “Cocky” book series (and an Authors Guild member).
In response, Hopkins filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against three people: Crescent, author and lawyer Kevin Kneupper (who challenged Hopkins’ trademark registration), and book publicist, Jennifer Watson. In doing so, Hopkins asked for a temporary restraining order to prevent the May 26th publication of a collection of stories by different authors, entitledCocktales: The Cocky Collective (Hopkins incorrectly named Watson as the publisher). The Guild’s attorneys prevailed in court last Friday the 25th to prevent the temporary restraining order and again today in a hearing on Hopkins’ motion for a preliminary injunction.
We opposed the attempt to block publication of a book, arguing: “Any order that restricts creative expression in favor of promoting the tenuous (at best) purported rights of a single author is simply contrary to the public interest in freedom of expression.”
Judge Hellerstein agreed and found that Hopkins was not likely to succeed on the merits because the word “cocky” is a common and weak trademark, there was no evidence of actual confusion, and romance readers are sophisticated consumers—meaning that they are not likely to confuse Hopkins’ and Crescent’s books.
You can read our papers here, filed jointly with attorneys for Kneupper and Watson.
(6) GRIDLOCK. The Ogden UnCon takes place June 7-9, 2019 in Ogden, Utah. That means there are three general SF cons scheduled within the same month — UnCon, FyreCon, and Westercon — all within 10 miles of each other.
(7) NOT TAKEI TOO? Washington Post op-ed writer Eric Berkowitz considers “The case against George Takei was always weak. Why were we so quick to believe it?”.
… But there was always a lot wrong with the Brunton story. Unlike Weinstein, C.K. or Spacey, Takei had never been known — even in whispers — for sexual misconduct. And Brunton’s tale didn’t quite hang together. He didn’t accuse Takei of drugging him until days after he first contacted the media, and, as detailed in a recent Observer article , he hadn’t even suspected that Takei had spiked his drink until years after the incident, when he read about the accusations against Bill Cosby. According to Shane Snow’s reporting, if Brunton had been given one of the date rape drugs in use back then, he probably would have no memory of what happened. Finally, Brunton told the Observer that he didn’t recall any touching by Takei. What began as an accusation of sexual assault was now, for Brunton, “a great party story” and “just a very odd event.” Takei responded to the Observer article with relief, tweeting, “I wish him peace.”…
The result is that we are too ready to believe that George Takei committed sexual assault and to assume that gay men are prone to it. We don’t know exactly why there was a rush to judgment against Takei — in the immediate wake of #MeToo, there were so many accusations being hurled, it was hard to keep track — but we can reflect on why so many of us are inclined to think the worst.
(8) DABNEY OBIT. NPR reports “Ted Dabney, Co-Founder Of Atari And Video Game Pioneer, Dies At 81”. He also co-founded the ancestor of Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Dabney, who generally went by Ted, and Nolan Bushnell had been working together at an electronics company called Ampex back in the mid-1960s, and Bushnell had an idea for a “carnival-type pizza parlor,” Dabney recalled in 2012.
“It’s one of these things, you have these ideas and no way you could ever make it happen,” he told the Computer History Museum. “I mean, you could barely afford the pizza, much less buy a pizza place.”
Turns out he was right — they couldn’t afford to start a pizza place, at least not then. But those conversations did start a tumultuous partnership that would, within just a few years, go on to create Atari, introduce Pong as a cultural phenomenon and help blaze a trail for the very medium of video games as we know them today.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- June 2, 1977 — Capricorn One premiered
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS
- Born June 2, 1915 – Lester Del Rey, sf author
- Born June 2, 1945 – Jon Peters, Executive Producer of Batman Returns, Producer of Batman, The Witches Of Eastwick and the Wild Wild West film.
- Born June 2, 1977 – Zachary Quinto, the new Mr. Spock
- Born June 2, 1978 — Dominic Cooper (Jesse in Preacher, Howard Stark in Agent Carter and Captain America: The First Avenger and a role in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.)
(11) HIRSUTE KNOWLEDGE. Camestros Felapton has posted the answers to his sff author beard identification quiz. How did you score?
(12) A FRIGHT AT THE OPERA. Broadway World says a Bradbury-inspired opera will open this summer: “Sci-Fi Opera THE BRADBURY TATTOOS To Premiere This July”.
In the nearly 70 years since late author Ray Bradbury published “The Illustrated Man,” various short stories in the classic science fiction anthology have been adapted for film, stage and television. Now, four of them serve as the basis for “The Bradbury Tattoos,” an ambitious new rock opera, scheduled to premiere July 13 and 22 at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati.
Written by composer Zac Greenberg and librettist Michael Burnham, “The Bradbury Tattoos” will be presented by concert:nova, a contemporary-classical ensemble founded by musicians from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Partial funding for the production is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“The opera is in four movements,” Greenberg explained. “The first three movements happen simultaneously, in different rooms. The audience moves from room to room, and then everyone comes together in the main hall for the grand finale.”
Stylistically, the movements range from classical string quartet to avant-garde classical, folk and big band. Though the stories are different, they share a common theme of humans coping with a frightening future:
- “Kaleidoscope” – The crew of a disabled spacecraft reflects on their lives, while drifting toward death.
- “Zero Hour” – Children play a game called “Invasion,” which turns out to be more than a game.
- “The Highway” – A husband and wife who live near a highway help refugees fleeing a nuclear war.
- “The Last Night of the World” – A married couple goes about their normal routines, despite realizing that the world is about to end
(13) CAREFULLY TAUGHT. The BBC asks: “Are you scared yet? Meet Norman, the psychopathic AI” — another demo that data matters when teaching an AI.
Norman is an algorithm trained to understand pictures but, like its namesake Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, it does not have an optimistic view of the world.
When a “normal” algorithm generated by artificial intelligence is asked what it sees in an abstract shape it chooses something cheery: “A group of birds sitting on top of a tree branch.”
Norman sees a man being electrocuted.
And where “normal” AI sees a couple of people standing next to each other, Norman sees a man jumping from a window.
The psychopathic algorithm was created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as part of an experiment to see what training AI on data from “the dark corners of the net” would do to its world view.
(14) SCARE THE HELL INTO YOU. The hype machine says “Hereditary: The ‘scariest film for years’ is coming”.
It’s been described as “the singularly most terrifying horror film in years” and “a new generation’s The Exorcist”.
Horror movie Hereditary has become one of 2018’s most eagerly anticipated releases after scaring and impressing critics in equal measure.
Actress Toni Collette is coming in for particular praise as a woman whose family has demons in its DNA.
Bustle said it’s “truly unlike anything you’ve seen before”, while The AV Club called it “pure emotional terrorism”.
The film is released in the US on 8 June and in the UK a week later.
(15) CAT HELP WANTED. In San Diego a “Beloved book store closing after 53 years” – and the bookstore cat, Bartleby, is unemployed!
It’s the end of an era on Adams Avenue in Normal Heights. After 53 years, the Adams Avenue Book Store is set to close its doors.
(16) ROAD ROCKET. Messy Nessy shares its photo album of “Fantastic French Publicity Caravans of Yesteryear”, which begins with this epic vehicle:
My wormhole began with this photo of the world’s first (possibly only) vehicle-shaped pen, the BIC mobile, photographed at the Tour de France in 1953. I’ve never been an avid follower of the annual cycling race that was created in 1903 by a French newspaper as a gimmick to sell more papers– but this? Give me a parade of the wackiest concept cars and publicity vehicles, and you’ve got my attention!
[Thanks to Robin Reid, Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, John King Tarpinian, JJ, David Doering, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, Greg Hullender, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
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Have we done Tom Gauld’s Lesser-Known Literary Prizes?
(1) FFS, it’s not that hard. If they can afford fancy signage and rental of platforms and tables, they can afford a ramp or two. Particularly if they know one of the panelists uses a chair. She was right to quit. Do they not have a disabled liaison at all?! Why can’t they use the checklist @Cat Rambo so helpfully provided, which I’m sure comes up on a web search? And why was the moderator such a bitch about her own Fail?
Also, that’s a small room, do they actually need the platform? Baycon didn’t use the damn things, so it was no problem for the panelists who use chairs, walkers, canes. And there were a lot of us crips and feebs 🙂 there. We got around fine.
Worldcon 76 has an extensive page on their disabled access, and a dedicated
Oh, she wrote “Bingo Love”! That book is so sweet and yet all the feels. Oof.
@Rev Bob is quite correct to say it’s easiest just to make the whole thing accessible. You never know when someone’s going to be temporarily disabled (like GoH on crutches that week), regardless if they’re 20-something and healthy. Accessibility is also great if you’re wheeling the kids around in a stroller, rolling a wheelie bag full of lovely new books, or just toting your wheeled luggage. By the end of a con, lots of people are tired and will use ramps instead of stairs. The rugrat stage humans will have less mobility around naptime, and it’s easier to get them up ramps than stairs.
Universal design is good for everyone.
(4) It’s not so much politics nowadays as “recognizing that other people exist and have worth”. Like Tee in (1) said, “I am somebody!” And as @NickPheas said, the new batch of conservative writers values infodumps/lectures about their philosophy over writing interesting stories. The important thing about popular fiction is “was that awesome to read?”
(5) Guess Faleena shouldn’t have been so cocky. I like Heather’s suggestion to do a dramatic reading.
(7) The guy recanted and admit he lied, right? (I can’t read the article). I didn’t believe it the first time I heard it; too much didn’t add up. And I wish Al Franken had stuck it out too.
@Jack Lint: Hahaha, excellent! I hadn’t seen that one yet, thanks.
Joe H. – I’ll count that as a vote for Deadpool
Cora – I did enjoy Deadpool 1 so I’ll count that as a vote for Deadpool also. If Solo was *definitely* bad that would be a vote in favour of watching it and writing something funny afterwards 🙂
Rev Bob – sounds like another vote for Deadpool
Nick Pheas – I’ll count that as another Deadpool vote
Kendall – Look like Deadpool is winning easily
Techgrrl1972 – A vote for Solo 🙂
I think Deadpool 2 looks like the winner but Solo is a decent 2nd choice.
@various re: accessibility:
It would be nice if it were easy or practical to make a con fully accessible. As a practical matter, that would require that the function space at the venue come largely that way-accessible. There’s the rub.
The majority of those using most venues don’t require ramps for normal use, so venues don’t consider them as standard. The best thing is to proactively find out ahead of time which panelists have mobility limitations, find out from the hotel/convention center what function space can most easily accommodate wheelchairs,scooters, crutches, walkers and the like and put any panels with panelists in that space.
Sadly, cons are run by volunteers on their own time who may or may not think of such things or may not have venues available with accessible space. The information’s out there, but you can’t make people read it, you can simply send it in their direction and hope they take notice. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t been to a con in more than 20 years-if I can’t maneuver around comfortably, why waste my time and $$$?
The plain fact is, the world is designed for people who can climb stairs, go up on platforms and get around things which they may not even see as barriers. Most people don’t notice because they lack the frame of reference.
I wish I could say that things will be better for Tee Franklin at the next con/event. Experience says it probably won’t be.
(16) I love those. We should have those everywhere, at all times (Okay, not in ice storms or tornadoes, but in good weather). The accordionist and singer in the wine barrel truck must have been pretty cramped on that tiny stage.
(4) Day-um on that book factory. Next thing you know, he’ll be doing “The Silver Eggheads” and cutting out the writers completely. Given what he specializes in, the cheap price, and that KU gives all-you-can-eat, I wonder if he’s cutting into the Pups’ favorite publisher’s business? (It seems like he’s got better editing, she snarked, and less lurid covers)
The first photo seems to show that white men of military experience writing Space Marines are doing just fine even with the terrible, awful SJW members of SFWA.
@Chip: If a place rents tables, it rents ramps. In my limited experience. Most hotels I’ve been in are fairly accessible, but that might be a function of the places the cons choose to patronize. This year’s Worldcon facility is quite good, though the elevators aren’t the fastest. I can still get around on my own 2 feet, so I tend to use the escalators in the main entryway part area thingie. I’m pretty sure everything I want to go to will be at the opposite end of the convention center from the previous thing I want, b/c it always is. 🙂 I shall trudge like I did at SV Comic Con. Downtown San Jose is very flat, so getting around isn’t a problem that way.
@Jack Lint: I hadn’t seen that — funny!
@Robert Reynolds: “It would be nice if it were easy or practical to make a con fully accessible.”
It would be nice if people didn’t make excuses for cons and the places which host them to snub the disabled, too. Unfortunately, saying that something would be nice doesn’t get the job done. Sometimes people have to make a stink about inequities and insist on decent treatment.
@ NickPheas: Have you read Starship Troopers? Virtually everything I knew about Libertarianism prior to my late 20s came from the infodumps in the narrative of that. Woven into the story, my ass.
One thing about accessibility is that some accommodations are mutually exclusive. For example, you might have one person with a severe dog allergy and one person with a service dog, or someone who is sensitive to scents and another who uses essential oils to manage their anxiety, or someone who finds steps easier than ramps. One of the famous ones is the bumpy surface that is used to indicate pedestrian crossings for the blind – it’s painful to stand/walk on for many people with mobility issues and positively tooth-rattling when you’re in a wheelchair. It is still important to accommodate both wherever possible, but universal design, as wonderful as it is, doesn’t always address those complications.
That being said, I would be super excited if universal design was, well, universal. Most access needs could be accommodated most of the time if it was only built-in from the start – it’s retrofitting that makes it complicated and expensive most of the time. Sadly, until more of the world has robust laws around new buildings and renovating, things aren’t going to get built-in because most of the people doing the building either don’t know or don’t care.
(Do not start with me, libertarians, unless you can also present proof of your multi-year successful campaign to persuade builders, engineers and architects to introduce universal design to all of their work whether new builds or innovative and affordable solutions for retro-fitting. Your small government principles don’t mean a heck of a lot to me when I can’t get into 80% of the shops in my town.)
(P.S. This doesn’t just apply to literal buildings. I read an article awhile back about how the reason braille editions are so incredibly expensive and slow to produce is because they’re not planned for and the manuscripts have to be reverse-engineered into a usable format before they can be converted.)
WRT Wheelchair/mobility ramps:
Accessibility design should mean that there is no HIGH stages for panels. If the riser is a foot or so above floor level, portable ramps that cost less than $1000 should be standard equipment for any hotel equipped to host a con.
‘But we need high stages for visibility!’ some will cry. I bet a video camera feeding to a screen above and behind the panel would work peachy keen and maybe allow for adaptive text captions, too! Jeez, I would think a bunch of sci fi nerds could come up with more than one solution for this problem if they took the time and effort.
I use a scooter. That I own. But I rent one when I am in another city. Turns out the places that rent scooters/wheelchairs often rent ramps, too.
I agree with the person way upthread that said, “ASK about mobility issues for panelists when you are arranging their appearance. Wheelchair or scooter? If either of those, can you walk a few steps up a ramp and sit at the table?”
Then figure out how to schedule rooms for maximum accessibility, and rent a ramp if necessary. Or suggest to the hotel that they would get brownie points if they owned one that could move from room to room.
I can walk short distances and walk up a flight of stairs if there is a sturdy handrail that I can use to bring upper body leverage to the move. But it’s easier if I don’t have to. And I am in a pretty privileged form of impaired mobility.
So let’s not shrug our shoulders here. As the population ages, mobility goes down. I have nothing wrong with me except osteoarthritis that has basically eaten away all the cartilage in some of my joints.
I saw Solo today, it is my favorite of the movies since the original. But keep in mind, according to Cams’ personality quiz, I am the Millennium Falcon
The combination of not using a platform and marking many front-end chairs for people with hearing and/or visual impairments works for wheel access for panelists in a lot of rooms, even some larger ones. Someone will have to move a panelist chair out of the way for that particular panel, unless the panelist prefers to transfer.
Add microphone use, marking audience floor spaces for wheelchair use, and marking a few aisle seats for panic disorder/IBS sufferers etc., and you have enabled access for a bunch more. (Some people also mark wheelchair parking in the back of larger rooms for those people who prefer to use their chairs for long distances but sit in a regular chair during the panel.) For hearing-impaired attendees and panelists, sign language interpreters and/or live captioners are amazing. (They are not interchangeable, though some people can use either.)
WisCon had a live captioner who did selected panels (as requested by hard-of-hearing members) and big events. It was fabulous. I used to be too tired after attending one panel to do another for hours, but with captioning I get more out of it and don’t exhaust myself.
We should have had sign language interpretation, too, but there was a failure of communication. This is gonna happen with the best of wills, unfortunately. I hope the departments in question will double-check next year, and the captioner’s work helped mitigate that mistake.
Ceci n’est pas une file.
Particularly if the general response to people like Franklin loudly calling attention to it is “Well, it takes effort and people don’t think about it and the world isn’t run that way, too bad”…
…instead of “It takes effort, so people should make the effort, and let’s not handwave that away.”
We’ve seen a lot of improvement regarding harassment policies since people stopped dismissing them as requiring effort that concoms don’t think about. We’ll see improvement on accessibility when that “oh well too bad” approach isn’t assumed as the natural state of things either.
@BGrandrath: My spouse & I just saw SOLO, too, and it was great! Talking after the movie, we both said we liked it and DEADPOOL 2 about equally. They were both very good – very different, but neither was significantly better or worse than the other.
Hmm, right now these will probably both be on my Hugo ballot next year. Of course, the year is young (well, middle-aged).
Not sure if I’m misunderstanding here, but iirc Robert Reynolds has years of experience of serious activism re: accessible spaces. He’s not making excuses or letting conventions off easy; he’s talking about how incredibly difficult and frustrating it is to get this stuff set up and available, especially when the convention in question isn’t really motivated to do their bit. And, you know, he’s not wrong.
Well I saw Deadpool 2 and it was entertaining but not as good as the first. The extra scene during the credits was excellent though.
Aw, we steered you wrong! Well, don’t listen to me saying SOLO is also very good. 😉
@Meredith: “iirc Robert Reynolds has years of experience of serious activism re: accessible spaces. He’s not making excuses or letting conventions off easy”
His comment was all about “here’s why it’s hard” and said not one word about anything that could be done to overcome any of that. That smells a helluva lot like making excuses and letting cons and venues off easy from here.
I’m also not sure why Mr. Reynolds has been avoiding cons for so many years, considering I have plenty of friends who attend and panel at them regularly who use everything from a cane, to a manual wheelchair, to big ol’ power chairs and scooters with everything added on because they can’t walk.
Maybe he lives in a crappy area, or maybe he doesn’t know how things have improved in 20 years? IMO, disability access improved sooner than non-harassment did, and I say that as both a woman and an occasional wheelchair user.
This year’s Worldcon has everything Lenore Jones talked about, and it’s not much out of the ordinary for fan-run cons in the area. Accommodations were happening in the late 80s for the obvious stuff, even before the ADA passed.
@Nancy Sauer – thank you so much!
Lurkertype on June 3, 2018 at 11:49 pm said:
Bookcon isn’t an SFF con. But it should know better. ANY convention of ANY sort needs to be asking it’s attendees and panelists what disabilities they would like accommodated and then accommodate them.
Recent World Fantasy conventions have refused to publish accessibility policies or even have ramps for panelists who use wheel chairs.
Last year’s Worldcon had completely foreseeable crowd problems that they didn’t adequately plan for that impacted mobility impaired people, and people who have problems dealing with crowds.
I have no idea how the New Zealand Worldcon people plan to accommodate mobility impaired members with their two-venue bid and neither does anyone else. (And if I don’t find out to my satisfaction before site selection closes this year, I’ll be voting “none of the above”.)
Cat Rambo has linked this the SFWA Disability Checklist here before, but here it is again.
We’re doing better, especially since 2015. But there is much room for improvement in many SFF conventions.
@Meredith:
Thank you! May you live to see the day when accessibility becomes the norm rather than the hard-won exception. At my age, I rather doubt I will be.
@Rev Bob, Kurt Busiek:
The two of you number among my favorites here. But I won’t be lectured to by the ambulatory with regard to accessibility and mobility issues. I was born a gimp and have dealt with these issues on a practical level, as opposed to the theoretical level your lectures start from.
In theory, cons (and most everything else) should be accessible. In practice, if the facilities aren’t accessible to start with, there’s only so much a con/event can do to accommodate people. They cannot retro-fit a building they’ll be using for, at most four or five days.
What happened to Tee Franklin is inexcusable. It’s also happened to her (by her report) at the last three cons/events she’s been to. Hence my statement that experience suggests things aren’t likely to change.
As has been pointed out here, there are checklists WRT accessibility available, with links. The information needed to make a good start is out there. You can bring it to people’s attention. You cannot make them read it or put it in action. I’m not making “excuses” for anyone. I’m acknowledging reality. BEA couldn’t even look at a panelist in a wheelchair and figure out that the panel needs to be accessible for the panelist,. According to Franklin, the moderator knows her, knows she’s on wheels and the panel was still on a platform. That’s a relatively simple problem to fix. If they blow that, insisting that the convention as a whole be accessible, no “excuses”, is Pollyanna-ish.
Given that the accessibility of facilities is largely beyond a con’s control, cons won’t be completely accessible until accessibility becomes the rule, not the exception. That’s not making excuses for cons or saying “why bother?”-it’s more than 50 years of banging my head and my body up against a real world which doesn’t care.
@lurkertype:
I haven’t gone to cons in more than 20 years because the logistics of doing so have grown increasingly impractical as I age and the basic breakdowns which come with aging add themselves to the mix. Couple that with accommodations that aren’t truly “accessible” (I’ve been in bathrooms labeled “accessible” which weren’t large enough for my wheelchair to either enter the stall or leave the bathroom usable to others and thus had to have a friend pull the chair out of the bathroom after I got in the stall and then come back in to get me) and traveling in general is ten times as complicated for me as it would be for most people. I’m not occasionally in a chair-a chair is part of my reality, with crutches as an adjunct.
Accessibility isn’t simply an ideal for me. It slaps me in the face daily. Not just using a cane as an aid for walking, but a chair or crutches to be able to move more than two or three feet by grabbing onto things and dragging my legs around or taking very small steps.
It’s all very well to have “allies”. But to be lectured at by people on things which impact your life in ways they can’t even fathom is more than a bit irritating.
Constructive replies will be treated appropriately. Otherwise, Further Deponent Saith Not.
All this has triggered a college memory. I had a friend in a wheelchair. Never much thought about it, he could get around just as easy as I could… I thought. One day he asked for my help. This was in the early early days of the internet, and in order to access the internet at the university, you had to fill out an application form. His problem was that the university had decided to put the office where those application forms were at the very top of the oldest building on campus. The ramps and wheelchair lifts didn’t go that far up.
So I made the trek, and got myself an application as well, and told the folks in the office what was happening. They were horrified. In any case, I went back down the three flights of stairs (only two with a wheelchair lift) and told my friend they were upset for him.
He said, “That’s nice, but it doesn’t really help me, does it?”
We filled out the applications together and I took them back up, and nothing more was said about it by either of us. We were both given access to the computers, and I learned about the internet when “September” was still a thing.
I still think about my friend and his wheelchair. I followed him around to his classes one day after talking with him about accessibility, and learned just how difficult it is for someone in a wheelchair to get around a campus designed originally in the late 1800s. It opened my eyes. There were ridges and steps in places that made no sense… walking I never noticed them, but he couldn’t roll over them without disaster. There was a series of grating at one point that he couldn’t avoid. If he hit it wrong, the wheel on his chair might jam and pitch him to the ground. It was awful.
I think all architects need to be forced to live in a wheelchair for a month as part of their training.
@Laura “Teagan” Gjovaag:
Re: architects, once when I was a member of an accessibility advisory committee appointed by city council and the mayor, reporting to the city, an architect working projects for the city asked us for feedback on some projects.. Several of us suggested that he use crutches and a wheelchair for a while and just do what he normally did for a couple of weeks.
Failing that, we suggested he follow people using them around. I suppose an architect who is disabled could explain problems to an architect better than we could. But there’s only so much a non-architect who doesn’t have the technical background can get across to an architect who’s never experienced what it’s like to be on wheels.
Hell, I’ve been disabled since birth, but the transition from cane to crutches was interesting. The move from crutches to a chair was eye-opening. They’re totally different, with their own challenges. You’re coming at things from a different angle.
I got a taste last year after breaking my knee. I went to cast my vote at an early voting polling booth. I was (only) on crutches & it looked straightforward.
But the closest lift wasn’t working (polling booth was on upper floor of building), so I had to get myself to the further lift bank & walk back. Then I found that the only way between the lift & polling room was through an adjoining room. Which was locked.
In the end I ended up walking up a couple of flights of stairs in my crutches (to get to the polling room from the entrance on the other side of the building), voting, then working my way (slowly & carefully) back downstairs.
The webpage on polling stations stated that this one had disability access…
(Where previously I had sympathy for people struggling with disability access, it is now *much* more amplified.)
@Robert Reynolds: “The two of you number among my favorites here. But I won’t be lectured to by the ambulatory with regard to accessibility and mobility issues. I was born a gimp and have dealt with these issues on a practical level, as opposed to the theoretical level your lectures start from.”
How blithely you assume that my experience with accessibility and mobility concerns is theoretical. It is not. I cannot shop without the use of a motorized cart, I use a cane when I need to walk any significant distance, I accompany my mother practically everywhere she needs to go because she can’t put her rollator in the back seat by herself… and at the end of a short excursion, even with the “aid” of painkillers that barely take the edge off of my chronic pain, I still hurt badly enough that it makes me queasy.
Yes, I am more mobile than you – but I’m still disabled, thank you very much.
@Lee, what I found most irritating about Starship Troopers was the characters declaring various outlandishly rightwing ideas to be “scientifically proven” and “mathematical facts”.
(1) the most depressing aspect of this is that accessibility is arguably one area of social justice where the US is, both in terms of legal commitment and of actual implementation, significantly ahead of many, if not most, other western nations.
@microtherion:
That is incredibly disheartening. Of course, it probably shouldn’t surprise me, as an old building in a European country may be several hundred years old, whereas in the US, it wouldn’t be nearly that age in what is a relatively young country.
The ADA will turn 28 next month. Prior to that, accessibility wasn’t a point of concern for most people. I would argue that, while quite a lot of progress has been made, most people still don’t care. I still hear complaints about handicapped parking spaces being the “best” spaces and how it sucks that we’re “privileged” in getting them.
We have a long way to go.
My sister uses a cane, and sometimes a rollator, because of diabetic neuropathy – which she only found out about when she fell on the steps to her previous apt. She has a handicapped placard, though she no longer drives, and carries it with her when she gets a ride with others. (I have a clue what it’s like, as I slowly recover from chemo-caused neuropathy. Not being able to be sure where your foot is and what it’s doing is, at best, annoying, and at worst it’s hazardous to your health.)
On a related note, last week’s episode of 99% Invisible, a podcast about design, went into the history of curb cuts (in the United States).
Fascinating.
Definitely worth a read and/or listen.
@ P J Evans: I’ve (sorta) lucked out on the neuropathy thing; instead of getting it in my feet, it’s on the lower part of my calves. Which is mildly annoying, but not nearly as much so as what you describe.
@lee
My annoyance also includes tips of thumbs and index fingers. Picking things up is harder than it used to be, but at least I can still write, type, and knit. (Note that these are side-effects they coulda-shoulda told me about beforehand, but didn’t. Maybe they don’t know, but it’s apparently common from one of the MABs. They asked all the time about nausea and pain, though, and I didn’t get those.)
I generally prefer not to play who-is-the-most-disabled but I do think there are experiential differences depending on when and why people were disabled. (This is, of course, aside from the various types and severity of disability or the relative resources and infrastructure available.) That doesn’t necessarily make anyone more or less “privileged” in any obvious fashion – privilege in the disability community is less of a straight line and more of a conspiracy theory-esque string diagram of complicated – but I’ve noticed it.
I read Robert’s post, knowing what I know about him and my own experiences, and felt it was very obvious that it was a wearily cynical but realistic view of how access works in most places and for most people, and that it was wholly critical of the convention’s failure. It’s interesting that it wasn’t so obvious to everyone.
Re: Relative access by country, the impression I got was that the primary difference between the USA and Western Europe was that the USA has fewer old buildings and a lot more space, both of which naturally help a little with accessibility. I hadn’t particularly got the impression that the legal, social or infrastructure set-up was clearly superior in other ways, but then I’ve never been there, either, so I haven’t been able to compare in person. I’ve rather got the impression that bits of Australia beat the pants off the rest of us in that respect, though, with very good access.
@Meredith
The US has a lot fewer places built mostly in stone. Relative newness matters – but it isn’t a guarantee, either.
[I’m thinking about the building I worked in, where some of the outside doors are hard to open even when you’re able-bodied – I suspect they’re not balanced/hung correctly, as I’ve met larger doors that are easy to open – and the elevators, above the second floor*, all open into lobbies with doors that have to be manually opened (AFAIK – there may be a way to get them automatically opening, but I’ve never seen one in that building). The restrooms have manual doors, also, though they’re *probably* wide enough for wheelchairs, and the wheelchair-accessible stalls are big, with extra-wide doors and nothing in the way (and grab bars on both sides).
*second floor is cafeteria and large meeting rooms; first floor is lobby, below that is concourse/street levels – it’s on the side of a hill]
@P J Evans
Oh, newer buildings are awful for heavy doors. They’re also more likely to have those horrible door closers on that make it completely impossible. It’s probably quite funny watching me try and open a door without rolling or sliding away from it, then hold it open while wheeling through, but I wouldn’t say it’s much fun. It’s easier on crutches because you can just lean on it until it starts moving and then you have momentum on your side – so long as you don’t fall over in the process. I’ve done that a couple of times…
USA doesn’t do much building in brick, either, judging from the home design blogs. Wood framed buildings are easier to change after the fact, I think.
There’s an organisation here which runs an annual competition for best and worst disabled loos. Some of them are truly absurd. And even in the decent ones people don’t necessarily bother to train their cleaners not to leave the alarm pull tied out of reach.
A building I once had to visit for benefits reasons had steps up to the front door, a lift that couldn’t be used without a key, and a broken intercom. I had someone with good legs with me, but I’m still not sure how they thought an unaccompanied wheelchair user would get in. Neither were they, when I asked, which wasn’t terribly reassuring. Oh, and they didn’t even have any parking.
@Meredith:
Thank you. My first comment (the one I made prior to the comment to which there have been replies) made it quite clear (I thought) that what happened at the BEA was ridiculous. There’s no reason Tee Franklin should have met with the situation she did and the con blew it there.
My age and my circumstances have made me tired and cynical regarding the world and being lectured on accessibility irritates me. In theory, a 100% accessible con/event is the ideal. But realistically, if a venue was built prior to 1990 in the US, 100% accessible anything won’t happen without remodeling to a greater or lesser degree.
In legal terms, the ADA, with all its flaws, probably puts the US at the forefront from an accessibility standpoint.
As far as “who-is-the-most-disabled”, in general, such assessments have little value. However, with respect to the issue of accessibility, the more mobile you are, the more ambulatory you are, the less trouble you have with accessibility.
I say this based on experience. In my life, I have devolved from a sort of controlled crash “walk” where I covered ground and fell a lot to crutches and a cane for tight spots to crutches and a wheelchair. I can go places and do things with a cane or crutches which I can’t do in a chair. There are restaurants, bathrooms and so on I can go into if I’m ambulatory that are forever off limits to me now that I’m in a chair anytime I leave home.
I can never go to my favorite restaurant in my hometown again because of the stairs I used to be able to manage on crutches. If I were sufficiently ambulatory, many things would still be open to me which aren’t now. So more mobility most definitely increases what you find to be accessible. It’s purely a practical matter in those terms.
@Robert Reynolds
Yeah, I went from regularly walking for miles without major issues* to cane to crutches to wheelchair in the space of maybe eight years, and each time it cut off a little more of the world. Some things are easier in the ‘chair (it’s a lot less tiring and painful) but the access isn’t. I expect there are access differences between manual and electric wheelchairs, too, but I’ve not tried them both.
I’ve been trying to find a nice, interesting restaurant to treat my parents to next time I visit them but locating one which is accessible, has a loo which is at least on the ground floor (people get upset if you crawl up and down stairs in public) and is near accessible public transport is a bit of a nightmare, especially since most restaurants don’t bother to put any helpful access information on their website (some chains do but they don’t serve interesting food). The London Underground is a wonderful thing but most of the stations are old and very, very inaccessible. Sigh.
*My particular thing is genetic, but it’s often small enough in impact not to be noticed in childhood except as a few quirks (I refused to use cutlery unless using “guests manners” – amongst other things – but those were all put down to stubbornness until everything got bad enough to be obviously Not Right) and gets worse during the teenage years, or because of other significant physical events (pregnancy; injuries; illness; ageing).
Well, I’m ambulatory as all heck, but anyone who thinks that less than ten lines expressing disagreement with what still looks to me like a wearily dismissive attitude toward accessibility is a lecture…
…well, don’t get me started on the history of the Black Widow, that’s all I’m saying.
The newer bits, most likely. I was in Western Australia recently, and my observation was that the newer buildings were as accessible as newer buildings in the US, the older ones not so much. In the US, the West Coast tends to be better at accessibility than the East Coast, again because it has more newer construction. Older buildings often have exemptions if the required modifications aren’t “reasonable”, whatever that means.
My favorite incident was at a restaurant south of Buffalo. The hostess, looking at the octogenarian with the walker and the sexagenarian with the cane, tried to seat us upstairs. “Is there an elevator?”, I asked, looking at the steep, narrow stairs. “No”, she replied, a bit astonished that someone would even ask. I thought but didn’t ask, well, in that case are there several strong young people with a sedan chair?
@Lin, it’s amazing how oblivious people can be if they haven’t lived with or worked with a disability.
I read “funny” stories all the time about workers answering the phone with their name and their company’s, and having the caller then inquire whether this is that company, and ask their name. That’s amazingly oblivious of the fact the caller might be hard of hearing, or have a bad connection, or be in a noisy place, or have an auditory processing deficit, or be trying to corral an uppity toddler/cat while calling. For a long time I faked it rather than ask for a repeat because I was afraid of looking stupid, and fantasized about wearing a “deaf, not stupid” button. Apparently I was raised with a serious anti-stupidity bigotry. I’m still not completely over it, and stuff like these stories don’t help. Grrr.
@ Lenore: Or that the person answering the phone may not have a proper “telephone voice” — they may mumble, or speak too fast, or swallow consonants or whole syllables.
I remember working at one company where we were taught that the proper formula for answering the phone was “Good [morning | afternoon], [company name], this is [your name]. How may I help you?” The explanation behind this was that (1) the first couple of words often don’t come across clearly, so make them insignificant; (2) the company name is what the caller needs to focus on first; (3) giving them your name is a friendly gesture. Even employees who weren’t likely to be answering the phone got the instruction on how to do so.
To this day, when I’m leaving a message that’s more than “Hey, this is Lee, call me back,” I do it in my telephone voice, slowly and with clear enunciation.
Lee, yep, a lot of people go way too fast because they have to say the same thing over and over. I get it, but then don’t blame the caller for not understanding. And if the caller says they are hard of hearing, or can’t hear you clearly, please, please slow down, speak up (without shouting), and enunciate clearly. Too many people appear to have done nothing at all differently when they ask me “is that better?”
When I have my loop headset properly attached I do pretty well on my mobile phone, but if I’m having trouble I need some help from the person on the other end. (The loop headset works like the big hearing loops some European buildings have, only the loop is just around your neck. Instead of the sound system the buildings use, it plugs into your phone. The other half of the apparatus is the same – the wearer’s hearing aid(s), tuned to the telecoil setting. Some headsets also have extra amplifiers, but I find those uncomfortably heavy to wear due to the requisite batteries, and instead drape the loop wire behind my ears to bring the sound induction as close as possible to my itty bitty in-ear hifi systems. These headsets only last six to twelve months, but the clarity is so much better with them that I keep buying them. Niche product. Also useful for listening to videos.)
@Mr. Reynolds: You missed the point about my wheelchair use? My mobility, energy, and pain issues that mean I leave the house for any reason maybe once a week? The excruciating pain I have 24/7 no matter how medicated? The fact that people I regularly go to cons with who can’t walk at all, some of whom are over 80 or largely paralyzed (no crawling!), still get around? And have done as much or more activism as long as you have? It’s true they don’t fly; that is a level of hell even for the able-bodied.
All the stores I visit are wheelchair accessible, as is my polling place, the schools and college (I personally measured every damn ramp at the college in my more mobile days), most of the public transit (bus chair lifts FTW), all but the oldest buildings in town (pre-WWII; anything after that has been adapted somehow), the restrooms are big enough to get a wheelchair, the user, and their attendant in (I’ve done it — there are smaller apartments!), plus ticketing of people who don’t have placards or plates for the parking spaces.
Maybe you live in a shitty place, I reiterate.
I think we all agree that BEA is a shitty, unthinking place this year.
@PJ: I hope your extremities improve.
@Rev. Bob: I’ve grown fond of grocery delivery. Walking, reaching, heavy lifting, florescent lights, shrieking, running children…
@Ultragotha: I got sympathetic hyperventilation just looking at what passed for “access” at Helsinki, either in stills or video. Sooo glad I didn’t go.
Might have to turn up at the Fannish Inquisition this year to ask New Zealand what gives — maybe they figure that since it takes forever on a plane to get there, nobody outwith the country who’s disabled is going to show up? Which won’t help @Soon Lee if the other knee gets broken. Also wondering what Dublin is going to be like — old stone and brick buildings with tiny roads.
@ Lurkertype:
The convention centre where Dublin 2019 will be held is newly built, so should (I hope) be pretty accessible. The hotels may vary, but the ones nearby where I’ve stayed all have lifts to all floors, but they also tends towards carpeted corridors (MAY be an issue, depending on wheel width). There are probably bumpy bits on floors that I didn’t notice.
My memory (again, I may be wrong here) is that the tram line along that part of Dublin is all “level access” (but there’s a ramp up from street level to the tram platform, maybe a foot or so of elevation gain, over several yards). Can’t say that I recall if the sidewalks are cobblestone/paving stone/concrete slabs/asphalt around there (roughly in order from worst to best for wheelchairs, from what I understand).
I don’t need a wheelchair, but I seem to, distressingly frequently, seem to travel with a large suitcase and large, heavy, bag of sports equipment, which is much easier when things are accessible.
I went to a local small convention some years ago that was in the least-accessible hotel I’ve ever seen. (Granted, I live in the US, where most hotels have been forced to comply with the ADA.)
My husband and I are not (so far) disabled, but we were traveling with at least a hundred pounds of portable photography studio, not counting our actual luggage. (He was the official photographer for the convention.) They gave us a room on the second floor. I walked all around the building, then came back to the registration desk and asked where the elevators were. “Oh, there aren’t any elevators.” So I requested a transfer to a first floor room, so we could use our cart to transport our gear. She gave us a first-floor room, we trundled our stuff to it… and there was a 4″ sill on the door. Now, we’re not disabled; we grumbled and unloaded the cart at the door and that worked ok for us. But how in hell someone in a wheelchair or a scooter was supposed to get into their room I have no idea. I actually saw some electric scooters parked outside rooms because there was no way to get them inside. Even someone with a cane who cannot lift their legs very far would be stymied. (And god help that person with a cane if they simply didn’t notice the sill; it was a MAJOR tripping hazard.)
Just to add insult to injury, the convention spaces were on opposite sides of the hotel… which was (I measured on the car odometer when I drove home) a full half-mile apart. I’m told some of the panels were in second-story rooms (without, as I mentioned, an elevator) but I never went to that half of the convention; I’m not disabled, but I twisted my knee unloading the cart when we checked into our room and I spent the rest of the convention borrowing my (arthritic) husband’s cane; a half-mile walk was out of the question. Some people actually drove to their panels.
@Cassy B: For an able-bodied person, a half-mile is a 10 minute walk. That’s worse than most Worldcons. I wonder why the committee couldn’t find a more suitable venue.
To be fair to the convention (which I will refrain from naming, but it has since died, possibly (probably!) in part due to the issues related above — they staggered on for only a year or two afterwards), I heard through the local con-runner grapevine that they lost their hotel only about six months before the convention, and the utterly unsuitable hotel that they ended up in was the only one they could book on such short notice. (Did I mention that the venue was rumored to be about to go into bankruptcy and as a result all the hotel employees knew that their jobs were likely vanishing, and therefore did not have a single fuck to give about how their guests were treated….?)
I am more grateful than I can say that I was *not* on the concom of that convention; my husband was their official (unpaid) photographer, but he had no actual standing with the concom either. Because, honestly, it was bad enough being just a regular con member. Every time I saw an identifiable concom member, they were being harranged by unhappy fans… (People complained to us as well because we looked official, having the photo studio there and all, but we explained that we were just regular members like they were and we had no authority, information, or influence….)
@Cassy B: That explains it, except why the hotel was a half-mile long.