advances doesn't include all of society this week we talk to three disability just as activists who have ideas about how tech can ensure design technology and art are accessible and equitable not just ideas  for the benefit of our viewers who are blind or visually impaired we are including audio description to introduce the program's key visual elements today the laura flanders program features dancer choreographer and technologist laur dad and social fellow chancy fleet and social worker and founder of ramp your voice alyssa thompson footage illustrates scenes from the national council on independent living conference in washington d c people march outside the white house holding signs a woman wearing rain gear holds up a nickel sign host laura flanders has a discussion with two activists on the board of nickel footage illustrates the disability art work of laurel lawson and alice shepard they're speeding down a ramp while twirling around each other in wheelchairs image on a wooden ramp laurel lawson wheels uphill coming nose to nose with alice shepherd who is coming down hill on her knees image laura lawson seated in her wheelchair looks over her right shoulder as she is seconds away from launching off the end of a ramp image laura lawson ressa a wheelchair her body curled around the frame of her chair image laurel balances  a side tilt holding a petite woman on her lap both smiling two dancers wrap around them on the floor footage illustrates laurel and alice intertwined in their arms together while spinning around each other in wheelchairs does design have politics can advance equality what about liberation for everyone as regular viewers of this program know we've been digging down into questions of disability justice and design and technology and as we've been doing so it's been brought to our attention just how debates about things that used to be narrow like access being blown open by disabled activists artists and hackers into fully fledged imaginings of the world from software coding to wheelchair repair to art and architectural design and engineering our environment is not heaven sent it's constructed and could be very different and way more interesting and fair no surprise those with the most at stake are at the forefront of all of this among them are today's guests laura lawson who is a dancer who we saw recently on the show in performance with alice shepard laurel is one rd of kinetic light and co founder and chief technology officer at the engineering consultancy psych or systems chancy fleet another return guest is a data and society fellow who coordinates technology education programs at the new york public library and joining us via skype felicity thompson who made a star appearance last year in our report on nickel and national council on independent living she's a social worker and disability justice activist and the person behind the hash tag disability to white and to the group ramp your voice so welcome all i have to say well let's start at the very beginning does design  politics who wants to take a bashing chances sounds like up your street it does every time i use a technology i am acutely aware of whether people like me people who are blind were considered in the design it's often eviden whether we were present in the design so for example i use an i phone it's pretty excessive while we were definitely considered in the design of the screen reader that enables me to move around and read things on the screen and send things to my braille display but i don't think that we were very present in the design because i can't speed syria up to the seven hundred words a minute i know how to read using audio and i have to perform if i get one of the new i phones i have to perform facial attention and which is not my strong suit so every time i pick pick up a piece of technology or teach it to a library patron i'm acutely aware of where we were where we weren't in the  change so we have technical design we have architectural design about you and design laurel everything is political technology is deeply political design is political who is there who is getting funded what is being son dead who is seen to have agency in the process as an engineer artist as a disabled engineer artist am at a very unique place in this web of goings on and who has agency who is presumed to have agency who is included the difference between access inclusion and equity is radical and my practice comes from a place of beginning with radical equity so an easy way to think about it if you think diversity is having people in the room inclusion perhaps could be thought of as making sure that they can participate that there is physical access there is sensory access there is financial access racial gender that you're beginning to attend to making sure those people can participate but then what does it mean to be equitable what what is it like if everyone in that room is assumed to be equally competent equally a part of the process all right so to give an example we're looking at some of the images of your work an addict like you and alice shepard and your colleagues what made what was your approach to making those performances accessible and equitable and equal in the way that you just described from a from the artist standpoint kinetic light is a collective of all disabled artists so we are coming from that place when we think about the performances we are sinking about our community where thinking about that experience from beginning to end how do people hear about it how do people purchase a ticket how do people come into the space and is that experience just as rich and powerful for someone who is blind is in a wheelchair is death is non disabled has a cognitive impairment all of these things matter and they all are details that have to be thought about during the performance for example one of our technological innovations is called automat this is a new kind of audio description that came about because our audience says our communities our friends told us that the state of the art wasn't good enough so we're going to talk more about the state of the art because we provided already your descriptions for both the episode that village there was in around nickel and the episode that alice shepard and de facto you were in in absentia around kinetic lights work and i have to say i found the order you describe sions adequate yes but not really sufficient to communicate what we were discussing i'll just play an example and i'd love to get his take on this and the less of a come back to you in a nd but here is what preceded understand how this works at present the video you hear this for the benefit of our viewer are blind or visually impaired we are including audio description to introduce the program's key visual elements today the laura flanders program features two choreographers alan shepard founder kinetic light and elizabeth streb founder slam streb lab for action mechanics footage illustrates the disability arts work of alice shepherd artist activist academic shepherd whirls gracefully in her wheelchair she performs with other dancers they speed down ramps in their wheelchairs partner in intimate poses and so were through the air in archival footage laura flanders father appears on stage sitting in his wheelchair a photo shows the vessel a tall honeycomb style structure with connected staircases so how do they do on my being too hard well if you wore to hear that and because you are sighted you were then to see the video that's being described would you account that to be an equal experience right so we had to do something we had to do something better so we began with the presence and leadership of blind and visually impaired artists audience members technologists we began exploring way to make an experience that is just as accurate as complex and as artistically rich as what you might experience visually our rights will come back and find out more about what you did in just a nd but chancey this whole area of making all sorts of things accessible is what you deal with every day in the library what's the state of things as they are and again i feel that these descriptions were i'm happy the people who g b h offer it and i give them thanks for the work they did but it wasn't simple it wasn't not costly  don't have baseline access to lots of visual representations of things that could and should be rendered in a non visual busy way and that's kind of what my work at the library is all about maybe i'll get to talk more about that later but with regard to descriptions specifically for independent media for smaller productions there isn't really baseline access to description and when we do have description what you've picked up on is that it was very workman like it was very objective and when you're experiencing dance when you're experiencing art i don't think that you want something so anna die and i think that you want to connect and a lot of my work this year my fellowship has been focusing on the value thoughtful the cavalry when we think about description and when we think about visual interpretation i want to shout out you describe which is a free tool that you can use to describe any you tube video and the reason that i want to shout that out is that more than one person can do a description for the same video there's also an app called the specular that does the same thing with your own photos you get five or six descriptions from random mostly helpful mostly strangers  and both of these tools really underscore that what each person perceives visually is different and that to build your own sense of meaning and priority often it's helpful to have the slates installed from the community and i know that we can't all have that all the time and i'd rather have basic concise workman like description the know description but what i most rather have is the flexibility to to engage on my own terms with content the less such e u the feminist magazine catalyst recently issued a special edition on what they were calling cripps techno science and you contributed an essay in which you said that technology i think the word you used was is dragging the disability justice movement into the st cent coming back to you chancy i'm hearing lots of things very practical things but i'm also hearing of the building of power and the agency of people with disabilities doing a bunch of us work at the library you're going to tell us a little bit more what you're involved i'm so i cofounded what we called the technology support clinic back in two thousand and ten as a volunteer we approached the library and said hey look as disability activists we teach each other how do things with technology all the time because our friends are family members and our colleagues who are using these tools normatively have like no clue they want to support us but they have no clue how assistive technology works we're helping each other but we want to reach people who are maybe new to blindness or new to disability and people who aren't really looped in connected to the community in the same way that we are as activists kemi make some space for that and the library welcomed us and eventually i was able to come on board full time with two other former volunteers we've got and just joined us a month ago and it's i think a really simple but radical premise premise that disabled people should be teaching disabled people the way that we do things liz jackson said in her new york times op ed a year or so ago disabled people are the original life hackers we're great problem solvers and the impact of the problems that we've been able to solve is amplified when we can come together in community and share those the latest work that we've been doing the dimensions project takes this kind of same ethos and applies it to tactile graphics in three d models when i was growing up and i think for a lot of us when we got access to tackle graphics res line drawings images they were usually in textbooks and they were always handed to us by a sighted person and kind of that whole production process would determine what images we saw what the characteristics of those representations were how long we got to keep them and everything and i want blind people to be able to be curious about something and look at it like anyone so we have a little graphics lab we have tactile graphics boss or we have a three d printer and we're teaching blind people and sighted allies to come in bring in images and create exhaustible representations of anything and loral what you came up with at the end of the day for your show for kinetic light stuck with me as an idea although i didn't experience it myself because the way that you described it i guess we think of accessibility as making things simple and the way you described it was no let's complicate in the of life and receptor and perception is complicated and that's really what you did sort of in a way you thinking about accessibility there isn't a single pathway one person's accessibility is not another person's accessibility and understanding from a disability st perspective is about those relationships about that process of bringing people together as a user interface architect that is something that we know in a very technical way we understand research we understand going to the people who are actually using the product but disability brings that knowing into an embodied community place disabled people make fantastic technologists and designers we were the original hackers disability is about being creative and about problem solving it's also in many ways reading and thinking about all of this caused me to think a lot about some of what we hold up as values for humanity independence productivity stand on your own two feet be a productive member of society and you throw a bat out and say wait a minute what kind of values are those really at least they should be optional who's really independent would any of us be here in manhattan without hundreds of thousands millions of people doing things so that we can be on this little island talk about on the t v set villa's the how do you think about this stuff because i'm now getting of you can see to these questions of how is the work that is happening in the area of disability just as kind of rehashing and a reimagining our world for everybody microsoft boasts of having at the top of its design team i think a deaf person with an entirely deaf team a woman is not right that's any different do you have hope of all of them hopeful you optimistic about all those i'm in a mixed state about all of it so i am tremendously happy with the shift that microsoft has made in recent years towards having an accessibility presence that's really up front and gauges directly with users they've made a lot of great strides with their culture in in learning from users in hiring people with disabilities but all of the big tech companies have an even accessibility performance i'm not going to call anybody out because it would be unfair because anybody could be called out you can't find a large tech company that doesn't have at least one core offering that is broken for accessibility at any given time and so i have to walk this tightrope between being grateful to the workers for doing the work that has been done but being insistent that the work is not finished and probably won't be close to finished for years thirty seconds from you laurel this is kind of funny actually because this gets to a talk i'm going to be giving next week on tech ethics we have such an issue right now and everyone in tech is aware of it that the point of danger we are in with private companies controlling so much of the devices the platforms the spaces we are dependent on those so there are ways to address it there is movement from within and without but this is a