tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77057148986806151922024-03-18T03:03:41.468+00:00Blind SpotThis blog maps my place as a partially-blind academic in a resolutely sighted world. It looks at blindness in history, literature, art, film and society through my out-of-focus gaze.Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.comBlogger146125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-21161345089110881362023-02-08T13:58:00.001+00:002023-02-08T13:58:12.798+00:00The Sensational Museum<h4 style="text-align: left;">The Sensational Museum: using what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.</h4><div><br /></div>Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a love-hate relationship with museums, especially those whose promises of disability access don't live up to the reality.... now I have a chance to share my thoughts and experiences in a more productive way...<div><br />From April 2023 I will be leading major new research project <a href="https://sensationalmuseum.org">The Sensational Museum</a><br /><br />This £1M project wants to transform access and inclusion within the museum sector by putting disability at the centre of museum practice and acknowledging the diversity and difference of all visitors. The team of academics and sector partners will work with disabled and non-disabled visitors, staff, and organizations to prototype and test a range of new ways of accessing museum collections and cataloguing objects. The 27-month long project (April 2023-July 2025) will focus on two key areas: how museums manage the objects in their collections and how the stories behind these objects are communicated to the public. At workshops and events across the UK, <a href="https://sensationalmuseum.org/">The Sensational Museum</a> will develop a sense-based approach to collection and communication. This approach assumes that no specific sense is necessary or sufficient to work with or experience museum collections. <br /><br />Many of my museum-based blog posts show that museums are very sight-dependent places. But many people want or need to access and process information in ways that are not only - or not entirely - visual. With this project I want to imagine a museum experience that plays to whichever senses work best for each individual visitor. <br /><br />The Sensational Museum is funded by the<a href="https://www.ukri.org/councils/ahrc/"> Arts and Humanities Research Council</a> (AHRC) and I'll be working with wonderful colleagues Anne Chick (University of Lincoln); Alison Eardley (University of Westminster); Ross Parry (University of Leicester as well as Esther Fox from Curating for Change and Matthew Cock from VocalEyes.<br /><br />I'm particularly excited about the range of partners we'll be working with: <br /><br /><a href="https://www.avmcuriosities.com/">AVM Curiosities</a> <br /><br />AVM Curiosities® has been exploring the relationship between art and the senses through a series of events and interventions since 2011. Founded by award-winning artist and food historian Tasha Marks, AVM Curiosities advocates for the sensory museum, championing the use of food and fragrance as artistic mediums. Projects range from olfactory curation and scented installations to interactive lectures and limited-edition confectionery. <br /><br /><a href="https://barkerlangham.co.uk/">Barker Langham</a> <br /><br />Barker Langham is one of the world’s leading cultural consultancies, creating pioneering and sustainable projects around the globe. Across all our work, we look at questions from every angle and challenge assumptions to create unexpected, imaginative and thought-provoking outcomes.<div> <br />Eric Langham, Founder, Barker Langham says:<br /><br />“We are delighted to be part of the Sensational Museum project, and are eager to explore the prospect of redefining ‘accessibility’ not as an add-on but as an integral part of everyone’s experience. By identifying more equitable ways for all visitors to engage with museum content in a trans-sensory way, together we can begin to reimagine the museum through a new sensory logic.”<br /><br /><a href="https://collectionstrust.org.uk/">Collections Trust</a> <br /><br />Collections Trust is a small, but influential charity whose mission is to help museums work with the information that connects collections and audiences. With Art UK and the University of Leicester it is building a Museum Data Service that will pool and share object records from UK collections as the raw material for countless end uses.</div><div><br />Kevin Gosling, The Collections Trust says:<br /><br />“While we welcome all aspects of the project, we are especially excited that it will develop an inclusive, open-access documentation interface linked to the Museum Data Service. Not before time, this will make it easier for a wider range of users to work with the information at the heart of museum practice."<br /><br /><a href="https://curatingforchange.org/">Curating for Change</a> <br /><br />Curating for Change is a 3-year National Lottery Heritage funded project at Screen South. It wants to create strong career pathways for d/Deaf, disabled and neurodiverse curators in museums.</div><div><br />Esther Fox, Head of the Accentuate programme, lead for Curating for Change says:<br /><br />“We are delighted to partner with the Sensational Museum on this exciting initiative to really examine what museums mean for audiences and staff. Our work with Curating for Change puts disabled people at the heart of leading change within museums and we are excited to support the Sensational Museum in building on this approach.” <br /><br /><a href="https://gem.org.uk/">Group for Education in Museums</a> (GEM)</div><div> <br />GEM is a membership-based sector support organisation for everyone interested in learning through museums, heritage and cultural settings. Our mission is to support and empower our community of colleagues to connect and develop their knowledge and skills to deliver learning. Our services to deliver our mission include professional membership; training and professional development opportunities; 1-1 support; annual conference and events; dedicated representatives across all four Nations of the UK; publications and digital resources, support for sector recruitment; conversations and advocacy about practice and the development of learning. <br /><br /><a href="https://www.museumsassociation.org/">Museums Association</a> <br /><br />The Museums Association is a membership organisation representing and supporting museums and people who work with them throughout the UK. Our network includes 10,000 individual members working in all types of roles, from directors to trainees and we represent 1,500 institutional members ranging from small volunteer-run local museums to large national institutions. Founded in 1889, the MA was the world’s first professional body for museums. We lead thinking in UK museums with initiatives such as Empowering Collections and Museums Change Lives and we provide £1.4m per year of funding for museum projects via our Esmée Fairbairn Collections fund and other grants.<br /><br /><a href="https://themuseumplatform.com/">The Museum Platform</a> <br /><br />The Museum Platform aims to democratise how museums can make their collections - and stories about those collections - available online as cheaply, as efficiently and as easily as possible. <br /><br /></div><div>Mike Ellis, Founder, The Museum Platform says:<br /><br />“At the heart of The Museum Platform is an aim to improve usability and access - not just for the public but also for time-pressed museum staff who need to maintain this content. We’re therefore delighted to be involved in The Sensational Museum, and are excited about getting deeply involved in the project with you and with all project partners over the coming months.”<br /><br /><a href="https://www.scottishmuseumsfederation.org.uk/">Scottish Museums Federation</a> <br /><br />The Scottish Museums Federation is a membership body for anyone interested in the Scottish museums and galleries sector. We provide our members with networking opportunities, a dynamic forum to share information and discuss current issues in the sector, and encourage creativity, enjoyment and personal development in the sector.</div><div><br />Quonya Huff, President of the Scottish Museums Federation says:<br /><br />“We're excited to be part of this pioneering project and even more so that it will bring tangible training to the Scottish museum and galleries sector.”<br /><br /><a href="https://vocaleyes.co.uk/">VocalEyes</a> <br /><br />We believe that blind and visually impaired people should have the best possible opportunities to experience and enjoy art and heritage. Our mission is to increase those opportunities, make them as good as possible, and ensure that as many blind and visually impaired people as possible are aware of them, and that the arts and heritage sector know how to create them, and welcome blind people as a core audience.</div><div><br /></div><div>Matthew Cock, Chief Executive, VocalEyes says:</div><p class="MsoNormal">We’re thrilled to be involved in The Sensational Museum,
which promises to be a ground-breaking project for the museum and heritage
sector, turning traditional practice on its head and placing the experiences of
disabled people at the heart of the process. VocalEyes’ role will be as Sector
Impact Lead, helping to disseminate the project’s research findings to people
working within museums and heritage sector organisations, raising awareness of
the findings, resources and toolkits, and influencing and bringing about change
to practice.</p><div><br /><a href="https://wellcomecollection.org/">Wellcome Collection</a> <br /><br />Wellcome Collection is a free museum exploring health and human experience. Its mission is to challenge how we all think and feel about health by connecting science, medicine, life and art. It offers a changing programme of curated exhibitions, museum and library collections, public events, in addition to a café. Wellcome Collection publishes books on what it means to be human, and collaborates widely to reach broad and diverse audiences, locally and globally. Wellcome Collection actively develops and preserves collections for current and future audiences and, where possible, offers new narratives about health and the human condition. Wellcome Collection works to engage underrepresented audiences, including D/deaf, disabled, neurodivergent, and racially minoritised communities.</div><div><br />Georgia Monk, Senior Project Manager, Exhibitions, Wellcome Collection says:<br /><br />"Wellcome Collection has been in the process of developing its approach to inclusive and accessible exhibition making for several years and this is the perfect moment for us to engage with the Sensational Museum project and learn collaboratively with this extraordinary group of peers and partners." <br /><br /><br /> <br /> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5ZqILZsQ5AljqGY931a63yVkkuW0KtlsRq7F8k6wR07wysCpUBj3gXRAod6YqoAhPU3y2PB-KnkaHMKhiRuLbzgvzLmGRMDN0-WGW6M8tEUM31tAzrwhSiglYk8bXKimgxpwAN7e0yQAyPDDM63CkiAeNY_PT43Ty2QljbMZ-cOq0z287i0brcO1p/s1083/TSM%20all%20logos.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="607" data-original-width="1083" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5ZqILZsQ5AljqGY931a63yVkkuW0KtlsRq7F8k6wR07wysCpUBj3gXRAod6YqoAhPU3y2PB-KnkaHMKhiRuLbzgvzLmGRMDN0-WGW6M8tEUM31tAzrwhSiglYk8bXKimgxpwAN7e0yQAyPDDM63CkiAeNY_PT43Ty2QljbMZ-cOq0z287i0brcO1p/w640-h358/TSM%20all%20logos.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>This is an image of the logos of all the university and heritage sector partners involved in the Sensational Museum</i></div><br /></div>Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-88136312720268205142022-04-10T15:42:00.005+01:002022-04-13T13:01:12.718+01:00The Louvre: A Museum Accessible to All?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOo6ooHT65MppRjqaiJ2K4E57wI8qk-G7rHE7K5cmtpX-i3CFFi_Cyx9-bjBlDiehFwVFNiRBzqstLieTClWXM1VcTHgy3DLyTl1npgt4PyaDLpARAtTpaunUVfJXmcjC9P_IFXD-6TZO2DsU_BZ79S7NBoIR2AG4CtDMr4orYCK9QW_8cXQ04Y_SG/s640/galerie%20tactile%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOo6ooHT65MppRjqaiJ2K4E57wI8qk-G7rHE7K5cmtpX-i3CFFi_Cyx9-bjBlDiehFwVFNiRBzqstLieTClWXM1VcTHgy3DLyTl1npgt4PyaDLpARAtTpaunUVfJXmcjC9P_IFXD-6TZO2DsU_BZ79S7NBoIR2AG4CtDMr4orYCK9QW_8cXQ04Y_SG/s320/galerie%20tactile%201.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><i>[This image shows the apparently now defunct Tactile Gallery at the Louvre. On a sign in the left of the image we read <span style="font-family: inherit;">‘Galerie d’étude I : espace adaptée aux visiteurs non et malvoyants’ {Study Gallery I: space adapted for blind and </span>visually<span style="font-family: inherit;"> impaired visitors'). Next to this sign is a bare room closed off by a metal gate. The room has stone walls and tiny </span>windows<span style="font-family: inherit;">. It seems to be bathed in creamy yellow light. It is completely empty. It looks like a designer prison cell.]</span></i><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="FR" style="font-size: 14pt;"><i><o:p></o:p></i></span></p><p><b>** UPDATE: 13/04/22 ** The Louvre got in touch the day after I published my post. They apologized for the current situation, thanked me for my feedback and have promised to work on better communication of their offerings to all concerned. They gave me <a href="https://petitegalerie.louvre.fr/article/parcours-audio-d%C3%A9crit">a link to the audio-described tour of the current exhibition</a> and reassured me that the Tactile Gallery has not gone for good, but is being renovated.</b></p><p>I am used to being disappointed by museums' accessibility offerings. (Examples <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/03/audio-description-in-art-gallery.html">here</a> and <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-spanish-gallery-in-bishop-auckland.html">here</a>). But I was not expecting to have my worst experience at one of the world's most famous museums. According to their website, the Louvre is "accessible à tous" (accessible to everyone). I was especially looking forward to visiting the Petite Galerie which has a very promising description on the <a href="https://www.louvre.fr/en/visit/accessibility/visitors-with-visual-impairments" target="_blank">museum website</a>:</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote><p class="MsoNormal">The Petite Galerie is a dedicated space for disabled
visitors. Entirely accessible, it is equipped with tactile ground surface
indicators. A braille booklet is lent free of charge and a downloadable guided
tour with audio descriptions is available on the Petite Galerie app.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p></p></blockquote><p class="MsoNormal"></p><blockquote>La Petite Galerie est un lieu d’accueil privilégié pour les
visiteurs en situation de handicap. Entièrement accessible, l'espace propose
des dispositifs adaptés : bande de guidage podotactile, prêt gratuit d’un
livret tactile remis, parcours audio-décrit téléchargeable sur l’application
"La Petite Galerie".</blockquote><p>After feeling frustrated by the general lack of access for blind people elsewhere in the Louvre, I was expecting great things from the Petite Galerie. I'm not a fan of 'special' rooms for disabled visitors, but some provision, even if marginalized, is better than none. </p><p>When we arrived, we found that the Petite Galerie does indeed have an audio described tour of a handful of items in the 'Figures d'artiste' exhibition on their app. Sadly, this exhibition closed last year: the current exhibition is not audio-described and the app has not been updated. To add insult to injury, the out-of-date audio is still on the app. Massive disappointment. The gallery attendants had no idea why this year's exhibition has not been described. They did, however offer me a tactile booklet that accompanies the current exhibition, 'Venus d'ailleurs: materiaux et objets de voyage' (From Afar: Travelling Materials and Objects).</p><p>Given that the 'Petite Galerie' is specifically designed for disabled visitors, I was pretty shocked and upset that I couldn't access audio descriptions of any of the 50 of so exhibits. But my friend and I decided to try the tactile booklet anyway. Here is what we found:</p><p>The booklet contains 2D relief drawings of 7 works; 6 objects and 1 painting. There is also a tactile plan of the exhibition which was supposed to help us locate the objects. The first two rooms in the exhibition have 'guidage podotactile' (raised floor markings) that are also shown on the tactile map. (Oddly the raised markings stop at the entrance to the third and final room: blind people are not welcome there). The AD of the previous exhibition explains how to find each object. Without it, we found it hard to locate the objects, especially because, as my friend pointed out, some of them are extremely small.</p><p>The tactile reproduction of the painting apparently does quite a good job of capturing the shapes and textures of the five shells:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgviGEVuqHQp1m2kdDXIcm4v7l9KYdWlncrIsJyxJkoUjL2-ATOKoLzT-WEpKeESRRGuppE6gIeuZWB1KzBlNNQFr6uaEtPntOo0NzOla9H5GrgBhE1SGR9wZP85X08JO6Ecezw7yuhie9ALs61el898yijTLjJj65FBWlwfZrByIX0VoD1Brpdb16I/s484/image%20shells%20ed.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="An oil painting of 5 shells in an ornate frame" border="0" data-original-height="484" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgviGEVuqHQp1m2kdDXIcm4v7l9KYdWlncrIsJyxJkoUjL2-ATOKoLzT-WEpKeESRRGuppE6gIeuZWB1KzBlNNQFr6uaEtPntOo0NzOla9H5GrgBhE1SGR9wZP85X08JO6Ecezw7yuhie9ALs61el898yijTLjJj65FBWlwfZrByIX0VoD1Brpdb16I/w317-h320/image%20shells%20ed.jpg" title="Cinq coquillages sur une table" width="317" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ0QOmR11hKW5pdpkJBm-IFJ6509WOOLUstwMyJ2ofO5g5Tf6LwhIyQlB2XrtVglVWzgeSb5TseO9G0AETHXDt9_2g3agJQAyAAiV7-hUUNi50nt90QvF_mXiAtzAWr_cJOqGyW4VpQhCjaVfaS993vYvq3fCvfb72fVAsHfvR1P8F9H53OC7eVxa6/s557/livre%20tactile%20shells%20edited.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="323" data-original-width="557" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ0QOmR11hKW5pdpkJBm-IFJ6509WOOLUstwMyJ2ofO5g5Tf6LwhIyQlB2XrtVglVWzgeSb5TseO9G0AETHXDt9_2g3agJQAyAAiV7-hUUNi50nt90QvF_mXiAtzAWr_cJOqGyW4VpQhCjaVfaS993vYvq3fCvfb72fVAsHfvR1P8F9H53OC7eVxa6/s320/livre%20tactile%20shells%20edited.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><i>[The top image shows an oil painting of 5 shells in an ornate frame; the lower image shows the tactile reproduction of the painting on the left-hand page of the tactile booklet; printed and braille information about the painting is on the right-hand page.]<br /></i><p>In fact, my friend thought that non-blind visitors would appreciate the details given by the tactile drawing, which are not necessarily visible in the painting. This is great if you care about the shells themselves, but less great if you want a tactile experience equivalent to how a non-blind person might look at the painting. Reproducing details that a non-blind person can't see, gives a skewed idea of how the painting looks. </p><p>The booklet gives basic information (title, artist, materials, dates, dimensions) in French in grade 1 (uncontracted) Braille and slightly larger than standard print. But there is no explanation of what the painting looks like, why it is significant or how it fits into the exhibition as a whole. Even more frustratingly, the exhibition's information panels and curator notes are not translated into Braille but are only available as wall panels in very small type. The tactile booklet gave me no sense of the exhibition as a whole.</p><p>Things got even worse when we compared the tactile reproductions of the 6 objects with the artefacts on display. Creating tactile drawings is tricky: you need to provide enough information to make the object recognisable, but too much information can be confusing, especially if not accompanied by an audio explanation. Unfortunately, the Louvre has decided that it is best to provide minimal information: this results in insultingly simplistic representations that feel more like children's' book illustrations than representations of historic artefacts. Compare the tiny elephant figure pictured below with its tactile representation and you will understand what I mean: </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNMwhVzbDLKmj6ugkdrjdSm9yd_VUiK_jnsJAjab_BWpaxZlo88u1hIIK2KGaFSdCCO_x9Z71_Lfcd7ASbSccmv37_5SjC-_GW0_5aVrqSoh6IpD6tfytCT0i2ir5_TtjdUludXNWUDJmVsuyWG7qVaYdwAC22SkQtwvpR4XXv9T2nqNnQJv1IUffJ/s640/image%20elephant.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNMwhVzbDLKmj6ugkdrjdSm9yd_VUiK_jnsJAjab_BWpaxZlo88u1hIIK2KGaFSdCCO_x9Z71_Lfcd7ASbSccmv37_5SjC-_GW0_5aVrqSoh6IpD6tfytCT0i2ir5_TtjdUludXNWUDJmVsuyWG7qVaYdwAC22SkQtwvpR4XXv9T2nqNnQJv1IUffJ/s320/image%20elephant.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVQr2gsWqK-xBLaXarByjLgVxPvlYb1HfEdWmGJlnPl4HxKB6gzrm07kn_jaByOwltfjMe71PjAjwcgcSZK93W-D5mte9GkLKyPooKctCHdSr8xE_ZOQGOOjEezpU5MM-UEFGUyQyfdNY7fddXssom1p69WJeTV0_oIs2dpZsKeiNFz8HzadS1aB_F/s640/livre%20tactile%20elephant%20ed.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="640" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVQr2gsWqK-xBLaXarByjLgVxPvlYb1HfEdWmGJlnPl4HxKB6gzrm07kn_jaByOwltfjMe71PjAjwcgcSZK93W-D5mte9GkLKyPooKctCHdSr8xE_ZOQGOOjEezpU5MM-UEFGUyQyfdNY7fddXssom1p69WJeTV0_oIs2dpZsKeiNFz8HzadS1aB_F/s320/livre%20tactile%20elephant%20ed.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p><i>[The top image shows a tiny bronze elephant statue. I have no idea what it was used for or where it is from. It is standing on a wedge-shaped platform so that it is at an angle with its front feet slightly higher than its back feet. It is in a display case with a mirrored back in which my face and phone are reflected. The second image shows a basic elephant shape in relief on the left-hand page of the tactile booklet. The right-hand page contains minimal information in print and braille.]</i></p><p>Nothing in the tactile booklet tells me how the elephant actually feels, and I have to use my own understanding of the one measurement provided (h: 9cm) to work out how the scale of the reproduction relates to the original. More worryingly, there is no acknowledgement that the practice of transforming 3D objects into 2D tactile representations is deeply flawed. Nothing in the reproduction gives a sense of the actual elephant. What we have here, at best, is a generic picture of an elephant: I am pretty sure that most blind people are familiar with the concept of an elephant. At worst we have an incredibly infantilising and insulting tactile drawing that tells us nothing about the artefact or its place in the exhibition. (Here is not the place to get into the dangerously Orientalist decision to use an elephant to represent the exotic other.....). </p><p>The tactile reproductions of the other objects were not much better. The elephant obsession continued with an 'olifant' (horn) made out of ivory. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhicfBTri0YXB7zr8n4limhxwxIJmERP2JDb4bL-DQOD_GGyVAmzg9L2oYfOWst8_A4ajgYvtJCCAhcfBoAiiE3wQFvQidSmstBqhYbkvqNnRJ0VYyiRmNMXd1qtcVsilwVhdRgUBh1VH4rHRm7r-7w4WyD_ditRVgK3V_dzvC8tljzeEkAJ0cXcdKm/s640/image%20tusk.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhicfBTri0YXB7zr8n4limhxwxIJmERP2JDb4bL-DQOD_GGyVAmzg9L2oYfOWst8_A4ajgYvtJCCAhcfBoAiiE3wQFvQidSmstBqhYbkvqNnRJ0VYyiRmNMXd1qtcVsilwVhdRgUBh1VH4rHRm7r-7w4WyD_ditRVgK3V_dzvC8tljzeEkAJ0cXcdKm/s320/image%20tusk.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3nOve-bY0qlczyj1UKl80NIFaw-J7ym5HeTEki9r0jz5pBlIeHqt5K6DSX04CtmKxN_jHmL1B0kDgrUbLmYcl2FVQ4UYhgTxw3dCLe4BZo9MOd7ZOnPoZVk-HM-7OygfgLC_7soX529jQpeZgnqIvT4aRZsNGxN40TTnAK-jQMuuNZK6pgAbm08wT/s640/livre%20tactile%20tusk%20olifant.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="640" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3nOve-bY0qlczyj1UKl80NIFaw-J7ym5HeTEki9r0jz5pBlIeHqt5K6DSX04CtmKxN_jHmL1B0kDgrUbLmYcl2FVQ4UYhgTxw3dCLe4BZo9MOd7ZOnPoZVk-HM-7OygfgLC_7soX529jQpeZgnqIvT4aRZsNGxN40TTnAK-jQMuuNZK6pgAbm08wT/s320/livre%20tactile%20tusk%20olifant.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><i>[The top image shows an 'olifant' hanging in a display case. There is a reflection of me in the background. The horn seems to have intricate markings carved into it. The lower image shows a double-page in the tactile guide. On the left, a tactile drawing of the horn. Two areas of the horn are outlined in red; enlarged reproductions of them are included below the drawing of the horn. On the right, minimal details about the horn are included in print and braille.]</i></p><p>This time there was an effort to include some of the details on the horn in separate drawings of specific elements. My friend noticed an explanatory panel next to the horn. It gives several sentences of interpretation in English and French as well as a map illustrating the object's provenance. The text on the panel is too small for me to read. None of it is included in the tactile booklet.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibMh87ScM-ggtFRa_7fc1A1ChE2r8ovOWiQTPiQh0Hws9yXXV2TOZyktgNKTPacJqRlDHC1QMbkv4SEbVgHBsJ_SI-4c3YQw9NG0EHmbQUrtUoqLIU90HzBoyPsQBQRlarKXv-hsgG2PGpu5NOuBhn9brT44wmvtZkftYCuiKTsXTfzYgYaeX3R_V4/s640/description%20tusk.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibMh87ScM-ggtFRa_7fc1A1ChE2r8ovOWiQTPiQh0Hws9yXXV2TOZyktgNKTPacJqRlDHC1QMbkv4SEbVgHBsJ_SI-4c3YQw9NG0EHmbQUrtUoqLIU90HzBoyPsQBQRlarKXv-hsgG2PGpu5NOuBhn9brT44wmvtZkftYCuiKTsXTfzYgYaeX3R_V4/s320/description%20tusk.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><i>[This image shows a display panel next to the horn. The text is in French and English. It is printed too small for me to read (perhaps 10 or 12 point). There is also a line-drawn map with a shaded area indicating where the object is from. I can see enough to guess it is Middle-Eastern.]</i></p><p>Almost all the objects in the exhibition are in Perspex display cases. But there was one object - another ivory horn - that was displayed without a case. I was enjoying touching it until my friend noticed what we thought might be a 'do not touch' symbol next to it. (The irony that I could not see the sign did not escape us).</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB5BkLwUIGJazfTt0eqFzOduW4RzK3yGSh3aciCyv1whpB98QbED2WW1EecAKeLycPyyjZjm1bKDVukIf5vmpC21IMRPsaAEBZ3Cuma_R39zdN0RkNuBByH-Q-kgKGUHxbdWFDXXKQ2gFHTq0eTmVL-IYX2_3j27KIok0Unz2q5fx5FcPLU8WKpxxI/s640/image%20tusk%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB5BkLwUIGJazfTt0eqFzOduW4RzK3yGSh3aciCyv1whpB98QbED2WW1EecAKeLycPyyjZjm1bKDVukIf5vmpC21IMRPsaAEBZ3Cuma_R39zdN0RkNuBByH-Q-kgKGUHxbdWFDXXKQ2gFHTq0eTmVL-IYX2_3j27KIok0Unz2q5fx5FcPLU8WKpxxI/s320/image%20tusk%202.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><i>[This image shows a larger elephant tusk or horn. It is not in a case and is invitingly at hand level. Below the object there is a short explanatory text. There is also a panel with two images: both crossed out by a red diagonal line: one is a hand with an extended finger; the other is a speaker with sound waves coming out of it and '<span style="font-family: inherit;">durée 8 minutes' written next to it: can this mean that there used to be an 8-minute AD for this object that is no longer available?]</span></i></p><p>To be fair, the gallery staff were pretty embarrassed and appalled by my experience. They are under-paid and over-worked and none of this is their fault. They suggested that we report the situation to the visitor experience team. They also recommended going to explore the Louvre's famous Tactile Gallery, one of the first tactile sculpture galleries in Europe.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="FR" style="font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p>On the recommendation of the gallery staff, we did go and talk to visitor services about the Louvre's offer for blind and partially blind people. When I explained that the Petite Galerie app no longer includes AD, they suggested that we avail ourselves of the 'standard' audio guide instead. However, further questions revealed the limitations of this standard audio guide for blind visitors. No, there aren't any audio descriptions of works included in the standard guide. Yes, there is explanatory, contextual and interpretative material only. Yes, you have to be able to read a number placed next to each work and enter it into a touch tablet. No, this system isn't accessible to non-accompanied blind people. No, there are no tactile handsets or braille or large-print transcripts. No, the objects in the Petite Galerie are not included in the 'standard' audio guide. Yes, it probably is true that the museum is not accessible to blind people.</p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our final stop was the famous Tactile Gallery. The Gallery opened in 1995 and soon became a flagship gallery for museum accessibility. When I asked my not-so-helpful visitor services helper for directions, I was stunned by his response: "Ah, Madame, ça n'existe plus!" (Oh, Madam, that no longer exists). nfortunately the attendants in the Petite Galerie did not know that the Tactile Gallery had been shut down. This is not just a temporary Covid Closure. As the image at the top of the page, and these two images, show, the Tactile Gallery has apparently gone for good:</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiybI0Zkn94nr55YlavZb33sSBro1oVPP0fQKaBjEVkJGTbNvq0ocTTjLoa95JsTRDAA9Jqz3RRWaYzTH_fQuXnL-XhtKamcURydGQ8Eju_WrhUtMZARgkymJb2jGLtRmO3XN6UhkNR2Kxl1vwf7_coGpsWY1QdKJMk9FwRox-IRsw4DsFXpJK4ECI7/s640/galerie%20tactile%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiybI0Zkn94nr55YlavZb33sSBro1oVPP0fQKaBjEVkJGTbNvq0ocTTjLoa95JsTRDAA9Jqz3RRWaYzTH_fQuXnL-XhtKamcURydGQ8Eju_WrhUtMZARgkymJb2jGLtRmO3XN6UhkNR2Kxl1vwf7_coGpsWY1QdKJMk9FwRox-IRsw4DsFXpJK4ECI7/s320/galerie%20tactile%202.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGKCSce4ZmGSQr5Q2H79fV9Ff7e8_L4P0r7eysAHCg5jSCmCNxTOUjcI7xwgAeEpRUxy-0gdL1WEU-hAKTApgybp7E5CVckuUUSTXQxOCFz3QGIvxVvfVsDdi628KghgN-h464RPQ9BbbiCkOYDgS8k-_-Bg3DzXE6woEPE02NGfFcjBFm76zORUK5/s640/galerie%20tactile%203.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGKCSce4ZmGSQr5Q2H79fV9Ff7e8_L4P0r7eysAHCg5jSCmCNxTOUjcI7xwgAeEpRUxy-0gdL1WEU-hAKTApgybp7E5CVckuUUSTXQxOCFz3QGIvxVvfVsDdi628KghgN-h464RPQ9BbbiCkOYDgS8k-_-Bg3DzXE6woEPE02NGfFcjBFm76zORUK5/s320/galerie%20tactile%203.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p><i>[The top image shows a sign reading <span style="font-family: inherit;">‘Galerie d’étude I: espace adaptée aux visiteurs non et malvoyants’ {Study Gallery I: space adapted for blind and </span>visually<span style="font-family: inherit;"> impaired visitors'). The lower image shows an empty room closed off by a metal gate. The room has stone walls and tiny </span>windows<span style="font-family: inherit;">. It seems to be bathed in creamy yellow light. It is completely empty. It looks like a designer prison cell.]</span></i></p><p>No-one in the museum could tell me why the Tactile Gallery has been abolished. If I were being charitable I would guess that it has been abandoned because it will become redundant once the Louvre makes every object properly accessible to all. Until that day comes, here is my advice for the Louvre:</p><p><b>Remember that 'access' does not just mean physical access to a space. </b>It also means giving people information and experiences in ways that work for them. There is no point offering to meet me at a bus stop and guide me into the Louvre if I then can't access any of the art once I am inside your 'accessible' building. </p><p><b>Be honest:</b> if there is no longer audio description, update your app and your website so that I don't waste my time and money. Your website promises something you don't deliver; you raised my expectations and that made my disappointment and frustration worse. It is rare that museums make me cry but you very nearly managed it.</p><p><b>Rethink your priorities.</b> You are one of the most famous museums in the world. Don't you think that everyone should have access to your collections? Surely you could invest some of the profit you make from entrance fees, and shop and café mark-ups into proper permanent access? How about leading by example?</p><p><b>Celebrate access</b>: as I have shown <a href="https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6487/5085">elsewhere</a>, creative audio description benefits all visitors. Instead of marginalizing disabled visitors make us the centre of your offering. No non-disabled visitor is ever going to say 'I hate this museum, it is too accessible'.</p><p><b>Don't hide behind excuses around logistics / finance / admin / aesthetics</b>: if small museums like the <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2020/06/audio-description-at-royal-holloway.html">Royal Holloway Picture Gallery</a> or the <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/search/label/museums">Guildhall Museum</a> can make their collections accessible, so can you.</p><p>I<b>nvolve disabled people in curation and exhibition design: </b>even highly qualified non-blind people are not as good at designing accessible exhibits as the people who use them.</p><o:p></o:p><p></p>Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-57329860419523863002021-10-30T12:28:00.000+01:002021-10-30T12:28:39.126+01:00The Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland: a land of missed opportunities<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://aucklandproject.org/venues/spanish-gallery/">The Spanish Gallery</a> is “the UK’s first gallery dedicated to
the art, history, and culture of Spain”. It opened on 15 October 2021 in the
small market town of Bishop Auckland, County Durham, and is part of the
ambitious <a href="https://aucklandproject.org/">Auckland Project</a> regeneration scheme. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On arrival, I was immediately impressed by the ramps,
automatic doors, and spacious lifts. A wheelchair access audit had clearly been
part of the museum’s design and wheelchair drivers were very well catered for.
However, when I asked about large print, braille, and audio guides I was met
with a baffled silence. “I don’t know about anything like that” said one staff
member, “but there are volunteers in every room who will read things out to you
if you ask them.” A well-meant offer, but the equivalent, for me, of a
wheelchair user being told: “We don’t have ramps, but our volunteers will carry
you up the stairs if you ask them.” I didn’t even bother asking about more
creative access initiatives such as the provision of torches and magnifying
glasses or live or recorded <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2017/03/audio-description-in-art-gallery-2.html">audio description.</a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Despite my all too familiar feelings of frustration, I made
my way through the automatic doors into the first of several galleries. The
paintings and some of the explanations were lit with spotlights and the rest of
the space was in semi-darkness. It was impossible for me to read the small
labels next to each picture, so I soon gave up even trying, and focused on attempting
to read the larger explanatory text at the entrance to each room.
Unfortunately, the design team had prioritized the overall look of the
galleries over their accessibility. Whilst some wall-mounted text had reasonably
good contrast, I’d say about half of the explanations did not meet <a href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/">Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines</a> (WCAG). WCAG is the international standard for the
accessibility of web content and can also be used as a helpful guide to making
non-web content such as signs, notices, menus and gallery labels readable. (If
you want to know how accessible your colour contrasts are, consult the
brilliant <a href="https://whocanuse.com/?b=b2b856&c=4f4f4f&f=20&s=">Who
Can Use</a> tool to find out.) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Things got slightly better on the top floor. I was
particularly interested in the wall-mounted copies of plaster casts originally
made in the early twentieth century “by unnamed craftsmen documenting the
sculptural heritage of Spain.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr7nl_JacKicATpa9oIsdC4lRRDvcfmlOLyyHG530xCGyMyRS7Moy_zlJ9762qsYoelP_IW0u0xnTYsnjm4sGhtgILyA-R_G4GuP6mtRPtpMQTqbGQjOYAVJeK3dcRS0YEkJzhHWaQCP8/s640/Spanish+Gallery+statues.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjr7nl_JacKicATpa9oIsdC4lRRDvcfmlOLyyHG530xCGyMyRS7Moy_zlJ9762qsYoelP_IW0u0xnTYsnjm4sGhtgILyA-R_G4GuP6mtRPtpMQTqbGQjOYAVJeK3dcRS0YEkJzhHWaQCP8/s320/Spanish+Gallery+statues.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">The image shows wall-mounted 3-D printed copies of early 20<sup>th</sup>
century plaster-casts, themselves copies of the Virtues of Prudence, Courage
and Temperance from the Sepulchre of Cardinal Tavera (1553)<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">The 3 statues are “factum facsimilies […] made from white
light scanned data merged with high-resolution photogrammetry. They were 3D
printed using SLA, moulded and cast in an acrylic resin.” They are part of the <a href="https://www.factumfoundation.org/">FactumFoundation</a> project to produce a 3-D model of the 1553 Sepulchre. You can read
more about the project on the <a href="https://www.factumfoundation.org/pag/sepulchre-cardinal-tavera#:~:text=The%20white%20marble%20sepulchre%20was,Tavera)%20in%20Toledo%2C%20Spain.">Factum
Foundation</a> website. Apparently, it was Henry Cole, the first director of
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, who initially championed the creation and
display of recreations of works of art. For him it was a way of making “works
of art freely available everywhere and to everyone.” Sadly, I was not allowed
to touch the statues or the sepulchre. Ironically, the museum’s celebration of Cole’s
vision of “shared cultural access” does not extend to non-sighted people. Even
though many museums are using 3-D printing to make objects accessible to blind
people, the objects in the Spanish Gallery have now become off-limits despite
their reproducibility. The museum’s labelling tells me that “Access can take
many forms from screens to headsets, glasses, hybrid mixes, but it can also be
physical.” Indeed. Another missed opportunity.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As I was leaving the facsimile gallery, I overheard one
staff member telling another about the QR codes that are included on a few of
the gallery’s labels. My ears pricked up and with the help of my companions I
located and scanned one.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNlevILQlHBNesYOE-xHtP7h2mbIaBHw9UvSZs9e2Iebf5VAxboElDKMFlsUDL1Xi8gfaQhdR0LNeZapsrlnYa5TH3Ix96oVekenhdjUumVTbVui2IWpf48trTqAkvlOca94NwBMNQn60/s449/Spanish+Gallery+label+1+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="291" data-original-width="449" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNlevILQlHBNesYOE-xHtP7h2mbIaBHw9UvSZs9e2Iebf5VAxboElDKMFlsUDL1Xi8gfaQhdR0LNeZapsrlnYa5TH3Ix96oVekenhdjUumVTbVui2IWpf48trTqAkvlOca94NwBMNQn60/s320/Spanish+Gallery+label+1+%25282%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">The image shows a small gallery label accompanied by a QR
code.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><o:p> </o:p><span style="text-align: left;">I was taken to a web page with a longer – and crucially –
zoomable – version of the gallery label. If only someone had thought to tell me
about these QR codes at the beginning of my visit. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuo03tDV7elnEImFZ1R85QS4sOCw2GcGCw99V_qdL3BnPp3Uq7mimb260FFpiTqmJLVjks_2enEOSr7hwF8-K93FEUy7Ijd7bTUKOirQL9I_citpHRedOY8EYA3FW11wftirf3ZQt1I4I/s1136/Spanish+Gallery+label+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1136" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuo03tDV7elnEImFZ1R85QS4sOCw2GcGCw99V_qdL3BnPp3Uq7mimb260FFpiTqmJLVjks_2enEOSr7hwF8-K93FEUy7Ijd7bTUKOirQL9I_citpHRedOY8EYA3FW11wftirf3ZQt1I4I/s320/Spanish+Gallery+label+2.jpg" width="180" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">This image shows my phone screen with the museum label enlarged thanks to the QR code. Presumably this webpage would also be accessible to Voice Over users.</div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: left;">Although not as good as an
accessible app like <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2020/06/audio-description-at-royal-holloway.html">Smartify</a> (used down the road in the <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2021/08/smartify-at-bowes-museum.html">Bowes Museum</a>), QR codes do
make the gallery content more accessible to smart phone users. Despite watching
me navigate the galleries with my white cane, no-one told me about the gallery’s
only accessible feature.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I don’t know how much the Spanish Gallery cost. But I do know
that its owners have created a land of missed opportunities. Accessibility was not built into the gallery's design and will now be hugely expensive and inconvenient to add. Staff are not briefed about how QR codes can function as an accessible feature. And the gallery has invested in 3-D replicas of sculptures that we are not allowed to touch. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-59715616208284956872021-08-26T16:17:00.000+01:002021-08-26T16:17:58.899+01:00Smartify at The Bowes Museum<p>This week I visited the <a href="https://www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk/">Bowes Museum</a> in Teeside. It is a museum I last visited as a child. I had fond memories of the grandiose architecture, and I used to love the wonderful mechanical silver swan, but I remember being frustrated by not being able to appreciate the thousands pictures and objects housed there (3038 apparently.) This time I was confident that the <a href="https://smartify.org/">Smartify </a>app would give me better access to the art, and I was not wrong.</p><p>I know from my work on the <a href="https://smartify.org/tours/audio-descriptive-tour">Royal Holloway Picture Gallery Audio Described Tour</a> that Smartify is a great way of making art accessible to people who, like me, don't usually see the paintings on display, let alone the interpretations of them. Smartify is a free-to-use smart phone app (but museums and galleries pay for its services).. It scans any given space for art works it recognises and then displays information about them, together with the work itself, on the phone screen. It wasn't originally designed for blind and partially blind users, but it has completely transformed the way I experience art galleries. </p><p>I need to have my nose almost touching a painting before I can see anything more than an indistinct blur. As a child (perhaps even at the Bowes) I quickly learnt that this kind of proximity to art is not allowed. It tends to trigger literal or metaphorical alarm bells. But how can I appreciate the art on display if I can't get close enough to see it?</p><p>This time I wanted to concentrate on the museum's nineteenth-century art room on the second floor. My latest research project is about French writers' unwitting attempts at audio description and how they might inform twenty-first century access initiatives. I knew that Emile Zola had written a short description of 'Grrandmamma's Brreakfast' (1865) by Francois Bonvin and this was the painting I had come to visit.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE_Xdv1_p-I7UTsDnZGv5s5zFsoGSlR3Awh881LArT7oViEi4H0laRMJB2J6Y1-rlDQl-ryPnZz-xCuJPpaBy-FqMr5FVCKcWseQanwzpjj9tmRZcZO9amruiMBZH_ARF5AQ6JV0B6aZ0/s1136/Grandmamma+Smartify.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1136" data-original-width="640" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE_Xdv1_p-I7UTsDnZGv5s5zFsoGSlR3Awh881LArT7oViEi4H0laRMJB2J6Y1-rlDQl-ryPnZz-xCuJPpaBy-FqMr5FVCKcWseQanwzpjj9tmRZcZO9amruiMBZH_ARF5AQ6JV0B6aZ0/s320/Grandmamma+Smartify.png" width="180" /></a></div><p>The image shows a screen shot from my iphone. This is what my phone displayed when it recognised the painting. A small image of the painting is at the top of the screen, followed by information including title, artist, date, dimensions and materials. There is also a paragraph with further information and a link to the museum's digital catalogue entry for the painting. This information is identical to that displayed on the label below the painting in the gallery. Non-blind visitors are thus given two ways of accessing information. On the other hand, Smartify is the only way for me to access this painting. Not only can I enlarge the image and zoom in on all its wonderful details, I can also enlarge the label text or use my phone's inbuilt accessibility feature VoiceOver to transform the text into audio. Thanks to Smartify, I can now access works of art independently. I don't need to ask a friend or relative to read things out to me and I can go to galleries when I want without having to fit in with scheduled audio-guided tours.</p><p>There is another feature of the Smartify app which is even more beneficial to me: the option to add audio files to any painting's information page. This is what we did to create the audio-described tour at Royal Holloway. I was delighted to discover that the Bowes Museum have included audio for a handful of their paintings. When I scanned <a href="https://smartify.org/artworks/el-greco-the-tears-of-st-peter">El Greco's The Tears of St Peter</a> I found two recordings where curators and art historians discuss the paintings in more detail. These are not originally intended for blind visitors but they are what I call 'unintended audio descriptions' because they give the listener visual information about the painting as part of a broader discussion. The same is true of all the artworks featured in the Bowes Museum's <a href="https://smartify.org/tours/young-curators-tour">Young Curator's Tour. </a> Adding audio files to the Smartify app effectively turns my phone into a handheld audio description device. It is a brilliant way for museums to include interesting content for all whilst simultaneously immeasurably improving access for blind visitors like me. </p><p> </p><p><br /></p>Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-18812220895789439862021-01-28T11:07:00.000+00:002021-01-28T11:07:04.591+00:00AHRC Fellowship Annoucement: Inclusive Description for Equality and Access (IDEA)<br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded one of<a href="https://www.ukri.org/news/ahrc-announces-edi-engagement-fellowships/"> 10 new Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Fellowships</a> for my project on inclusive audio description at the theatre. In this year-long initiative, I will be working with audio-description providers <a href="https://vocaleyes.co.uk/">VocalEyes</a> and <a href="http://www.mindseyedescription.co.uk/">Mind's Eye</a>, access champion Vicky Ackroyd from <a href="https://totallyinclusivepeople.com/">Totally Inclusive People</a>, and theatre companies including <a href="https://www.mind-the-gap.org.uk/">Mind the Gap Studios</a>, <a href="https://octagonbolton.co.uk/">The Octagon Bolton</a>, the <a href="https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/">Donmar Warehouse</a> and <a href="https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/">Shakespeare's Globe</a>.</span><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">This project developed out of the 2019-20 <a href="https://vocaleyes.co.uk/describing-diversity-report-published/">Describing Diversity research project</a> jointly run by VocalEyes and <a href="https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/">Royal Holloway University of London</a> with additional support from Shakespeare’s Globe and Donmar Warehouse. Its key output was a report, <i>Describing Diversity: An Exploration of the Description of Human Characteristics Within the Practice of Theatre Audio Description. </i>[<a href="https://vocaleyes.co.uk/about/research/describing-diversity/">download the report here</a>].</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Between March 2019 and May
2020, we investigated how diverse human characteristics might best be described
in the audio introductions used by theatre audio describers to introduce blind
and partially sighted audience members to a play’s characters before the play
starts. Along with touch tours and live audio descriptions, audio introductions
provide blind and partially blind theatre goers with essential information
about the play’s setting, costumes, props and characters. Our research found
that references to protected characteristics such as gender, race, disability
and age are not always made in inclusive and ethical ways. Either describers
avoid mentioning such characteristics for fear of ‘saying the wrong thing’, or
they inadvertently use loaded or negative language to describe them. In both
cases, blind audience members are not given access to the visual markers of
diversity available to their sighted peers. Our Describing Diversity project addresses
this lack of equity by using the research findings, as well as consultation and workshops with audio
describers, to develop a set of recommendations about best practice in AD for
both audio describers and theatre professionals. These recommendations are
designed to promotes equality, diversity and inclusion both for <b>people being
described</b> and for <b>people listening to the descriptions</b>. The report was
published in September 2020 and <a href="https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/news/royal-holloway-academic-s-describing-diversity-report-influences-itv-s-new-audio-description-policy/">has already informed ITV’s accessibility policies</a>.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">This AHRC Fellowship project ‘Inclusive Description for Equality and Access’ (IDEA). will support
and enable theatre professionals and audio describers to engage with and
explore our findings in order <b>to promote the creation of inclusive
descriptions which celebrate diversity in ethical ways. </b>We will<b> </b>work with directors,
casting directors, actors, access professionals, front-of-house teams at producing theatre companies as well as
audio describers and blind and partially blind theatre goers, to promote the
value of AD as both a <b>communicator</b> and a <b>driver</b> of equality,
diversity and inclusion. IDEA will also seek to increase the diversity of audio
describers, blind and partially blind theatre goers and theatre professionals
by engaging under-represented groups with the creation and reception of inclusive
audio description.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">We
will focus on the following key questions:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>1) How can audio describers describe diversity characteristics, especially race
and disability in an inclusive and ethical way?</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Race
was the diversity marker which attracted the most comments in our survey and
interviews and <b>integrated casting</b> (sometimes referred to as ‘non-traditional casting’<b> </b>or ‘colour-blind casting’) is a key issue to explore in IDEA.
Whilst IC can refer to situations in which an actor’s age / gender / disability / body shape are not taken into account by casting
decisions, in the survey responses it was most often evoked with reference to
race. The recent rise to prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the
UK and the increased awareness of the effects of white privilege are further
evidence that the question of how and when race is described to blind and
partially blind audience members is a pressing issue which will be at the
heart of IDEA. </span></div><div><b><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></b></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 150%;"><b>2) How can audio descriptions take account of the creative team’s vision for the
play?</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
importance of consultation with actors and directors at an early stage of the audio
description production was frequently highlighted and practical difficulties
such as cost and staff availability were cited as the key barriers to this
happening. IDEA will facilitate better consultation between audio describers
and the creative team by</span></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Embedding
an awareness of and interest in AD in the DNA of theatre</span></span></li><li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Helping
theatres to understand what is at stake if AD is not inclusive and ethical</span></span></li><li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Raising
awareness of and interest in aspects of diversity that ADs may not yet have
direct experience of it</span></span></li><li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Connecting
individuals and organisations through exploration of shared interests and
initiatives</span></span></li></ul><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
aim of IDEA is to promote inclusive audio description by <b>taking the report’s
describer-led recommendations back to theatre professionals and blind and
partially blind audience members</b> in a series of workshops, discussions
and performances.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">IDEA
will:</span></div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: inherit;">engage
a diverse range of theatre professionals, blind and partially blind audience
members and audio describers with the report’s findings and the practices of audio
description more broadly</span></li><li><span style="font-family: inherit;">strengthen
existing networks of audio describers and theatre professionals by creating a
safe space for discussions and a shared set of resources on the project website</span></li><li><span style="font-family: inherit;">create
new partnerships with theatre professionals and audio describers who were not
involved in the preparation of the ‘Describing Diversity’ report but who are
interested in developing their own understanding of and practice in inclusive
audio description</span></li><li><span style="font-family: inherit;">provide
support (through mentoring; training; peer support; access to resources such as
a video and a MOOC; support for community engagement; help with audience
feedback) to theatres, theatre professionals and audio describers who want to
implement the recommendations of the Describing Diversity report</span></li><li><span style="font-family: inherit;">promote
the value of inclusive audio description for a range of audience member groups
beyond blind and partially blind audience members and in so doing increase the
visibility of audio description in the theatre</span></li><li><span style="font-family: inherit;">encourage
the use of inclusive audio descriptions, particularly audio introductions, in
films and on television, for both live and pre-recorded content.</span></li></ul></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">To
achieve the above aims, we will work with a diverse range of theatre
companies to produce </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">2 audio-described productions</b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> per partner. We include
theatres outside the south-east of England; theatre companies who work with or
represent under-represented groups; theatres who are interested in extending
their audience base to under-represented groups and theatres who would like to
strengthen their equality, diversity and inclusion practices.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">The project will also employ post-doctoral researcher Rachel Hutchinson as Project and Community Engagement Manager. Rachel
received her PhD from the University of Westminster in 2020. Her thesis
examines the impact of inclusive audio description on engagement and memorability
in museums for blind and sighted people. She is was a post-doc research
assistant on the Describing Diversity project and lead author of the report.</span></div><div><p><br /></p></div>Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-45380693062762884012020-08-08T11:34:00.000+01:002020-08-08T11:34:32.905+01:00Blindness at the Donmar Warehouse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSkwAl0W2VudCGNPRQYxJIiDlxg214crcR-WlJbFVzuR1e2d2_Dk8siQlplJ7ounDJWX45lxBEIvUyYyFxEe4IwzcomewZXmjUHbVlVLmdMyx9KBct0BPePlmGOQIP0ZjB9fzjQYv0IEM/s1600/Hannah+Donmar.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSkwAl0W2VudCGNPRQYxJIiDlxg214crcR-WlJbFVzuR1e2d2_Dk8siQlplJ7ounDJWX45lxBEIvUyYyFxEe4IwzcomewZXmjUHbVlVLmdMyx9KBct0BPePlmGOQIP0ZjB9fzjQYv0IEM/s320/Hannah+Donmar.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Image description: a photo of my standing to the right of a poster for the Donmar Warehouse's production of BLINDNESS. I am smiling broadly. Dark glasses cover my eyes and the top of my white cane stands next to me. On the poster, the cast and creatives are listed. My name appears in the list alongside the description 'Production Consultant'.</i></div>
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When I heard from my friends at <a href="https://vocaleyes.co.uk/donmar-warehouse-blindness-audio-introduction/">VocalEyes</a> that the <a href="https://www.donmarwarehouse.com/production/7878/blindness/">Donmar Warehouse</a> was planning a production of Saramago's problematic novel <i>Blindness </i>my heart sank. The all-too-familiar alarm bells started ringing in my mind. 'Will this be yet another sighted peoples' depiction of 'blindness as tragedy'? I wondered. 'How dare sighted people tell us what our blindness feels like!' I fumed. I worried about whether this supposedly 'non-visual' installation would turn into a wrong-headed simulation of blindness which might have the dangerous effect of further stigmatizing blind and partially blind people.<br />
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Luckily, the Donmar team were very receptive to my concerns. After a Zoom meeting with them, I was appointed 'Production Consultant' for the installation. My job? To help them understand why many blind and partially blind people find Saramago's portrayal of blindness so offensive, and to work with them to find ways of using the production to think about blindness in different - perhaps more positive - ways.<br />
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Saramago's novel depicts a world where sudden, contagious blindness leads to the disintegration of society. As people go blind, they lose their dignity: they become violent, sexually aggressive and ruthless and the world descends into chaos. Eventually, one group of blind people are saved by the only sighted person left. She finds them food, gives them shelter and makes them clean again. At first I wasn't sure there was anything the Donmar would be able to do to redeem this unremittingly tragic depiction of blindness. The production is an adaptation of the novel, so it needs to use the novel's words and actions. But then I realized that that potential of the piece lies not in its content, but in the ways this content is presented.<br />
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Lockdown has made traditional theatre impossible because live actor performances are not allowed. So the Donmar created a socially-distanced sound installation with binaural audio recorded in advance. Aside from some powerful lighting effects (which are audio-described at every performance), the production is entirely reliant on our sense of hearing. As such, it is compelling evidence that we do not need our sense of sight to enjoy the theatre. By asking non-blind people to temporarily relinquish their reliance on
visual sources of information and focus instead on their often-neglected
listening skills, the production performs a re-calibration of the 'hierarchy of the senses' where vision is dislodged from its traditional place at the top. The most powerful moment in the show is when the audience is plunged into absolute darkness. In this instant we become completely reliant on the beguiling voice of Juliet Stevenson's narrator, and we strain our ears to capture every sound of her presence. We are suddenly alone, with the intimate whispers of the character as our only guide. I did not find this plunge into the dark frightening, although I suspect some non-blind people did. I found it liberating. Finally I could devote my whole being to listening without worrying that I was missing some of the visual information which is so highly prized by my non-blind peers. I could have sat in the dark all day listening to the mesmerizing drama unfolding around me.<br />
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But light did return, and the audience gradually became visible once more. I expect most people were relieved at this return of daylight. I felt oddly disappointed as I was forced back into the sighted world I have such a problematic relationship with.<br />
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It would be easy - but perhaps a little lazy - to criticize this production for reiterating Saramago's negative depictions of blindness. But this would be to miss the point of the Donmar's use of immersive binaural technology. This adaptation is the perfect place to challenge misconceptions of blindness because it gives us a powerful aesthetic experience without any need of sight. Unlike the negative depictions of blindness in Saramago’s
novel, this installation delivers important messages about
the value of the non-visual senses, the creative and aesthetic benefits of
blindness and the ways that the concept of ‘blindness gain’ might encourage
non-blind people to reconsider their own misconceptions of blindness.<br />
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<i>For more on the depiction of blindness in the installation, as well as my thoughts on blindness gain, reading blind and trying to 'pass' as sighted, listen to the <a href="https://soundcloud.com/donmarwarehouse/reclaiming-blindness/s-awf1rnBzHC7">podcast</a> recorded by me and writer Simon Stephens to accompany the production.</i><br />
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-43396595700032340302020-06-16T17:53:00.002+01:002021-04-19T16:20:33.237+01:00Audio Description at Royal Holloway<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNCcw9GqG1wUX4gPU5wSTpkD65cdvexOk6FMSrvgcJZs4KoJTtgwn1sKYZY6w0s6-isbxtaHb2fyaTSIlEgrgZYVapysJetwX0vl_M7JHzSeYFP6PA2QD_NV7HajgHg3IeN7XKR9gY4TU/s1600/Man+Proposes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="900" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNCcw9GqG1wUX4gPU5wSTpkD65cdvexOk6FMSrvgcJZs4KoJTtgwn1sKYZY6w0s6-isbxtaHb2fyaTSIlEgrgZYVapysJetwX0vl_M7JHzSeYFP6PA2QD_NV7HajgHg3IeN7XKR9gY4TU/s320/Man+Proposes.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Image Description: The painting 'Man Proposes, God Disposes' by Sir Edwin Landseer hangs in its lavish golden frame among other paintings on a rich red wall in Royal Holloway's Picture Gallery. Read on for a link to a creative audio description of the picture.</i></div>
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Those of you who have been following Blind Spot Blog for a while will remember the 2015 <a href="http://blindcreations.blogspot.com/">Blind Creations</a> conference and micro arts
festival held at Royal Holloway, and organised by myself and Vanessa Warne (University of Manitoba). One of the highlights of the conference was a live audio-described tour of some of the paintings displayed in Royal Holloway's famous <a href="https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/art-collections/">Picture Gallery</a>. </div>
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Since the success of Vanessa's audio descriptions at Blind Creations, I have been working with the College
Curator, Laura MacCulloch to explore innovative ways of making the College’s
Art Collections accessible to a wider public. I have also been <a href="https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6487">researching and writing about creative audio description</a> and talking to a lot of people about my theory of ‘blindness gain’. Laura has been working hard to secure some funding to make the Picture Gallery more accessible and has been using the museum and gallery app <a href="https://smartify.org/">Smartify</a> to create virtual information panels for all the gallery's pictures. </div>
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Earlier this year, Laura was able to employ an audio-description intern to help us run a crowd-sourced audio description project. We invited volunteers from across the College community (including students, staff and alumnae) to produce their own creative audio description of paintings in the Picture Gallery. Unlike traditional audio description, creative audio description (CAD) does not claim to offer an objective description of an image. Instead it recognizes that each beholder will see things differently. It welcomes non-normative gazes and encourages individual and inventive responses to art. It celebrates diversity of interpretation and asks people to produce a subjective response using whatever words speak to them personally. These creative audio descriptions give both
blind and sighted visitors a new way of experiencing art. They highlight the describer's responses to each painting's aesthetic and emotional
aspects as well as to its visual appearance and place in the gallery. They are an excellent example of 'blindness gain'.</div>
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Our project has been put on hold during the Covid-19
pandemic, but Laura and assistant curator Michaela Jones have used Smartify to create <a href="https://smartify.org/tour/audio-descriptive-tour">a free online audio-described tour of a selection of paintings from the Picture Gallery.</a> Thanks to this tour, these paintings are
now accessible to blind people around the world. You will hear a short
introduction by me followed by creative audio descriptions of 15 paintings
from the Picture Gallery, including famous works such as ‘Man Disposes, God
Proposes’ and ‘Princess Elizabeth in Prison at St James’’ alongside some
lesser-known gems. Some of these are located high on the Picture Gallery’s
walls and are not usually spotted by visitors to the gallery. 14 of the
descriptions are by current students and staff and we have also included one of
the original recordings from Blind Creations, where the project originated.<br />
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As
well as improving access to the Picture Gallery and adding to the range of
online gallery tours available for free during lockdown, this project has also
enhanced student employability through the creation of internships;
strengthened links between different parts of the college community; and
created a set of creative audio descriptions which I will be able to use as my research into the benefits of creative audio description for everyone develops. </div>
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S<i>pecial thanks go to Laura MacCulloch, Michaela Jones, Emma Hughes and all the staff and students who volunteered to be part of the project. </i></div>
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-6628936803397385182019-12-21T16:33:00.002+00:002019-12-21T16:35:25.220+00:00New Book: Discours et représentations du handicap. Perspectives culturelles<span style="font-family: inherit;">Critical Disability Studies is flourishing in Anglo-American academia but it is still an emerging discipline in France. Four years ago I was delighted to speak at a ground-breaking French conference on the subject. Now I'm equally pleased to have my work included in the wonderfully wide-ranging collection of essays from the conference. This collection is an important testimony to the diversity and vibrancy of Critical Disability Studies in France and will prove essential for anyone working on disability in a French context. </span>The book (32 euros), or individual chapters (2-3 euros each) can be ordered <a href="https://classiques-garnier.com/discours-et-representations-du-handicap-perspectives-culturelles.html">here</a>. The bibliography is available free of charge <a href="https://classiques-garnier.com/discours-et-representations-du-handicap-perspectives-culturelles-bibliographie.html?displaymode=full">here</a>. Most of the essays are in French with a couple in English.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Below I list the essay titles with their English abstracts. <i>Bonne lecture!</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="font-weight: bold;">Discours et représentations du handicap. Perspectives culturelles</i>, edited by Céline Roussel and Soline Vennetier (Éditions Classiques Garnier, 2019)<br /><br /><b>Introduction (</b></span><b>Céline Roussel and Soline Vennetier)</b></div>
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T<span style="font-family: inherit;">his introduction, which critically examines the development of Disability Studies and draws on the definitions of the notions of discourse and representation related to social and cultural practices, explores links between the contributions by researchers from various backgrounds. Using an terdisciplinary approach, it investigates the methods and tools of analysis from Disability Studies and probes their adaptations and equivalents in the French academic field. <br /><br /><b>Tammy Berberi – The Role(s) of Art and Literature in (Re)making Disability </b><br />These remarks explore the pleasures of the unexpected as they continue to shape the author’s experiences as an American traveling in France and a disability studies scholar working in French and English. In literature as in life, the spaces in which people live, work, and imagine shape how they navigate their communities and themselves: barriers that foreclose on some experiences give rise to others, enriching one’s identity and disability as lived and studied around the world. <br /><br /><b>Anne Waldschmidt – Conceptualiser le modèle culturel du handicap comme dis/ability : perspectives interdisciplinaires et internationales / Disability Studies and the Cultural Model of Dis/ability. Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives </b>Drawing on interdisciplinary and international debates, this essay develops a cultural model of disability in order to provide a framework to analyse dis/ability with the help of methodologies and approaches from Cultural Studies. As a necessary supplement to the social model of disability, the cultural model can help to understand better the relationships between society, culture and dis/ability. With it the intersections of 'normality' and 'disability' become the actual object of research. <br /><br /><b>Pierre Ancet – Handicap et culture. La culture comme travail de réflexion / Disability and Culture: Culture as Reflective Work </b><br />Culture fosters encounters – encountering the other and the unknown within oneself. To be cultivated means to cultivate distance from one's own certainties, which may prove salutary when one is different, or when one believes oneself to be “normal compared to others.” Disability offers an unusual experience of both the body and the world. Disability will be examined in relation to scientific and artistic culture, the practice of arts, and the mutual discovery of people’s humanity. <br /><br /><b>Michael Schillmeier – Le handicap (visuel) – des perspectives exclusives aux différences inclusives / (Visual) Disability: from Exclusive Perspectives to Inclusive Differences </b><br />Drawing on the practices of blind people in a visual culture, this paper introduces the concept “inclusive differences” of disability, suggesting that disability is the outcome of historically specific, embodied human and non-human configurations fabricated within the conduct of everyday life. This concept question the attempt of exclusive perspectives that try to divide analytically “disability” into an individual (natural) bodily impairment or a purely socio-cultural attributed disability. <br /><br /><b>Sébastien Durand – Parole et musique d'aveugle : la correspondance de Maria-Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824) avec Johann-Ludwig Weissenburg (1752-1800) / Blind People's Words and Music: the Correspondence Between Maria-Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824) and Johann-Ludwig Weissenburg (1752-1800) </b><br />In the 18th century, an Austrian young blind woman, Maria-Theresia von Paradis, aroused admiration for both her musical talents and her social adaptability. She started up a regular correspondence with Johann-Ludwig Weissenburg, an erudite blind man, who became her tutor. These texts, partly published in the newspapers of the time, disclose a wealth of information about the lives of blind people from the affluent upper classes of European Enlightenment society. <br /><br /><b>Flora Amann – Disability Studies, histoire de la littérature française et histoire des représentations : surdité et Révolution dans le roman sentimental français / Disability Studies, Literary History and History of Representations: Deafness and Revolution in the French Sentimental Novel</b><br />This study of the figure of the mute aristocrat and his relationship to discourses on deafness in sentimental novels after the French Revolution offers an enriching analysis to the disciplines of Literary History and Disability Studies. It contributes to the history of representations of deafness through time, and it offers a better understanding of the ways that themes and forms in these novels are inflected with their social and political context. <br /><br /><b>Mathilde Villechevrolle – Donner corps à ses frayeurs. Discours médical sur la surdité et anthropologie de la démocratie / Embodying one's fears. Medical Discourse on Deafness and Anthropology of Democracy </b><br />Medical discourses on deafness in the 19th century France have to be analyzed in relation to the development of political post-revolutionary democratic ideals, and to the “passion de l'égalité” it nurtures. The junction between vitalism and empiricism on the one hand, and the political inclination for a non-hierarchical society on the other hand, cristallizes into the figure of the deaf, and reeducating his/her speech becomes an aim where the political and the medical mingle. <br /><br /><b>Marion Chottin – Les aveugles des philosophes de l’Âge classique aux Lumières : aléas d’une pensée de la cécité entre rationalisme et empirisme / Philosophers' Blind People from the Classic Age to the Enlightenment: Hazards of a Thought on Blindness Between Rationalism and Empiricism. </b><br />This paper proposes a solution to a paradox of the Enlightenment, a century when both the French Royal Institute for the Blind was created, and the Empiricist philosophers, including John Locke, argued that ideas came from the sense of sight. Although this philosophy did indeed produce a negative notion of blindness, Empiricism also generated an alternative view, specifically in the work of George Berkeley, Denis Diderot and d’Alembert, that in fact favoured the education of blind people<br /><br /><b>Barbara Fougère-Danezan – Take Shelter (USA, 2011) : l'implant cochléaire au cœur de la tempête, ou la surdité comme prisme d'analyse cinématographique / Take Shelter (USA, 2011): Cochlear Implant in the Eye of the Storm, Or Deafness as Prism for Cinematographic Analysis</b><br />In his ecofiction titled <i>Take shelter </i>(2011), the American director Jeff Nichols sets up a parallel between an ecological disaster and a young deaf girl being fitted with a cochlear implant. By doing so, he sets up a narrative system which plays on the tensions between Nature, Culture and Technology, that will be approached drawing on methodological and conceptual frameworks from Disability studies. <br /><br /><b>Olivier Schetrit – Le théâtre tremplin des Sourds : enjeux identitaires et esthétiques à travers l'exemple de l'International Visual Theatre / Theatre as a Springboard for Deaf People: Identity and Aesthetic Issues Through the Example of the International Visual Theatre </b><br />The Deaf Awakening of the 1970s was a pivotal historical period. The creation of the International Visual Theatre in 1976 offered an important micro-space for the expression of Deaf culture through various ways of staging sign language, and for valuing Deaf identity. The stage remains a privileged space in Deaf art for expressing freely one's art and Deaf culture, beyond normative judgement. <br /><br />M<b>arie Astier – Mise en scène et mise en jeu du handicap mental sur la scène contemporaine française. L'Empereur c'est moi ! : un spectacle qui invite à un changement de paradigme / Mental Disability on Stage and at Stake in the Contemporary French Drama. L'Empereur c'est moi !: a Stage Adaptation Inviting to a Shift of Paradigm </b><br />This paper focuses on the analysis of <i>L’Empereur c’est moi!</i>, a stage adaptation of the autobiographical book written by Hugo Horiot, who defines himself as having Asperger’s. Performed by the author himself, and by the deaf actress Clémence Colin, these neurological and sensorial differences move the performance away from dramatic form, as defined by Peter Szondi, to draw closer to what Hans-Thies Lehmann has called “postdramatic theater”. <br /><br /><b>Nidhal Mahmoud – <i>Les Emmurés</i> de Lucien Descaves : un exemple de typhlophilie littéraire / Lucien Descaves’ <i>Les Emmurés</i>: An Example of Blind-friendly Literature </b><br />Though they appear in some great works of classical literature, blind characters are generally represented as cloaked in misfortune, deprivation and darkness. By associating them with the figure of the beggar, art and literature have often abetted their exclusion from social life. Lucien Descaves rebels against such depictions in Les Emmurés (1894), an engaged, playful and original novel in which he strives to rehabilitate characters whose damnation revolts him. <br /><br /><b>Hannah Thompson – Reading Blindness in French Fiction through Critical Disability Studies </b><br />Critical Disability Studies’ desire to celebrate blindness for its own sake finds an echo in fictional representations of visual impairment. Two key French representations of blindness, Lucien Descaves, Les Emmurés (1894) and Romain Villet, Look (2014), show how these writers’ positive attitudes to blindness demonstrate the socially, and culturally, constructed nature of disability, offering a useful, and timely, means of disassociating blindness from its hitherto negative connotations. <br /><br /><b>Bertrand Verine – La nuit et le noir, clichés métaphoriques de la cécité / Night and Darkness: Clichéd Metaphors of Blindness </b><br />A survey of discourses and practices in French blind culture reveals the persistence of metaphors of “night” and “darkness” to signify perception of the world without sight. Analysis suggests that these are visual metaphors that convey primarily an obsession with discovering or recovering absent light. Yet this dominant imaginary is subverted by some writers who express the possibility of existing beyond visual perception and the binary opposition of light versus night. <br /><br /><b>Ella Leith – Performing "Hearing-ness": Representations of the “signing impaired” in Contemporary British Sign Language Storytelling and Signart </b><br />This paper focuses on the way “hearing culture” (i.e. non-deaf and non-signing people's ways of being) is represented in British Sign Language (BSL) vernacular performance arts, otherwise called “Signart”, through four illustrative examples of BSL performance-texts from the repertoire of an Edinburgh-based performance group, Visual Virus. It considers how cultural hearing-ness is portrayed in a way which contests hearing-centred discourse on deafness. <br /><br />J<b>ulie Chateauvert – Intermédialité et proxémie : propositions pour une méthodologie d'analyse de la création en langue des signes / Intermediality and Proxemy: Towards a Methodology to Analyze Sign Language Creation </b><br />Although currently referred to as “poetry”, narrative creation in sign languages draws on aesthetic devices which resonate with art forms other than literature such as bodies in movement, performing arts, and image work. Beginning with an epistemological contextualization, this paper provides a political and aesthetic study of Jolanta Lapiak's work in order to showcase a method of analysis, which is capable of responding to the complexity of works considered as intermedial objects. <br /><br /><b>Kyra Pollitt – La « langue » et la « poésie » représentent-elles la « poésie en langue des signes » ? / Do Language and Poetry Represent Sign Language Poetry? </b><br />What evidence shows that academic discourses can alter perceptions of real-world phenomena? Using the case study of creative language forms in British Sign Language communities, the analysis explores what difference a name makes. What are the real-world implications of using the terms ‘sign language poetry’ or ‘Signart’? <br /><br /><b>Anne-Lyse Chabert – De la nécessité de changer notre manière de regarder le handicap / How and Why we Need to Consider Disability Differently </b><br />Which is the most useful perspective when talking about “disability”? Is an external, internal, or combined point of view enough in itself? The analysis of these three different points of view suggests that one fails to recognize the plenitude of a disabled person’s existence. Shouldn'tt we try to reclaim this plenitude by beginning with what he/she has to offer, independent of “disability” and his/her point of view? </span></div>
Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-87190324283504245692019-02-24T17:37:00.000+00:002019-12-21T16:34:32.719+00:00Audio Description and the OscarsI've been doing a lot of thinking about audio description recently. Ahead of this year's Academy Awards Ceremony, I wrote an article for <i><a href="https://theconversation.com/uk">The Conversation</a></i> about why I think film awards like the Oscars and the BAFTAs should honour audio description alongside things like acting, sound effects and direction. Read the article <a href="https://theconversation.com/oscars-audio-description-brings-film-to-life-for-blind-people-it-deserves-an-award-too-112247">here</a>. And I wrote a review of Extant and Yellow Earth production <i>Flight Paths - </i>a play which uses integrated audio description in inventive and effective ways. Read the review <a href="http://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/flight-paths-follow-the-traditions-of-the-japanese-goze/">here</a>.<br />
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-11369491315409927522018-11-19T13:04:00.001+00:002018-11-19T13:08:00.955+00:003rd International CAFE Conference, Bilbao<br />
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<i>This image shows myself and fellow panel members Lyubomyr Pokotylo (CAFE Audio Description Commentary Network) and Julian Ronca (AD Commentator, Olympic Marseille) listening to Alan March deliver a live AD Commentary. Examples of Alan March's ADC can be found <a href="https://www.alanmarchsport.com/audiodescription">here</a>.)</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This week-end I was
delighted to be invited to speak on audio description commentary at the third <a href="http://www.cafefootball.eu/en/news/third-international-cafe-conference-take-place-estadio-san-mames-bilbao-16-17-november">international CAFE conference</a> at the Estadio San Mamès in Bilbao. <a href="http://www.cafefootball.eu/en/our-vision-total-football-total-access">CAFE</a> (Centre for Access to Football in Europe) is a pan-European organisation supported by FIFA and UEFA. It aims to promote equal access to football for all and has been successful in implementing improved access features at recent European and World football tournaments. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">During my session, I was especially
pleased to hear from Alan March, who is a hugely experienced audio
description commentator. and expert member of the </span><a href="http://www.cafefootball.eu/en/cafe-audio-descriptive-commentary-network-and-training-programme" style="font-family: inherit;">CAFE Audio Description Commentary Network and Training Programme</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. During his talk, Alan used a comparison between TV, radio and AD commentary of the same goal to reveal just how crucial properly delivered AD is to blind and partially blind football fans. Unlike the TV and radio commentary we are used to hearing, good ADC should enable anyone - whether they are blind or non-blind - to understand what is happening on the pitch (and off it) as it happens. We saw in Alan's examples that TV and radio commentary is often just that - it comments on the action without describing it, and thus relies on the listening public also having visual access to what is happening. That this assumption of visual access routinely happens in mainstream radio commentary is beyond disappointing. As I know from my own experience at the </span><a href="https://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2016/06/bravo-for-live-audio-descrption-at-euro.html" style="font-family: inherit;">2016 Euros in Toulouse</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, good audio description can transform the match-day experience. If I can imagine the movement of the ball I feel immersed in the action of the game. But if all I have is general reflection on the players' performance, I feel completely isolated from the fans around me. As Alan's demonstration showed, AD commentary is very different to the kind of AD found in the cinema (and which I discuss </span><a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2012/03/audio-description.html" style="font-family: inherit;">here</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="https://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2013/12/audio-description-3-even-better-for.html" style="font-family: inherit;">here </a><span style="font-family: inherit;">and </span><a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6487/5085" style="font-family: inherit;">here</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">). ADC is as
unpredictable and spontaneous as the game itself. It takes effort, commitment and energy to deliver a successful ADC. Like the simultaneous interpreters who translated our panel into French, German, Spanish, Polish and Russian, AD commentators are performing a hugely difficult and </span>skillful<span style="font-family: inherit;"> task of immediate translation. Whilst certain elements can
be prepared in advance, such as the lists of players and descriptions of the
stadium architecture, the bulk of the ADC has to be delivered spontaneously. It is a thrilling addition to any game and is an example of what I call '</span><a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2018/10/blindness-gain-and-art-of-non-visual.html" style="font-family: inherit;">blindness gain'</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> because it has the potential to add value to every spectator's experience. Like the audio book, ADC deserves to be taken much more seriously. It should be offered as a matter of course at all live sporting events and professional standards of training and accreditation should be developed to reward and </span>recognize<span style="font-family: inherit;"> those who deliver it so well.</span></div>
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<span lang="FR"><span style="font-family: inherit;">CAFE is passionate about all kinds of access. At the conference we also heard from football's
governing bodies FIFA and UEFA about their access initiatives and there seemed
to be a genuine commitment to make sure that major tournaments are accessible
to all. Perhaps more importantly, we also heard from disabled fans about how
better access has radically improved their experience. I was
particularly struck by the testimony of Stephen and Morgan Parry who explained why
it is crucial that all stadiums include <a href="http://www.changing-places.org/">Changing Places</a> rooms so that non-ambulant disabled
adults can access toilet facilities. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="FR"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I was also interested in the conference for other reasons. This year I have been responsible for developing and delivering
a new <a href="https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studying-here/undergraduate/modern-languages-literatures-and-cultures/translation-studies">Translation Studies degree programme </a>at Royal Holloway. With my
linguist's hat on, I was fascinated to see the work of the simultaneous
interpreters during the conference and frequently switched between English, French and Spanish channels on my headset to compare their translations. When the first of many videos was projected during the conference I also searched in vain for the audio description channel. Given that the tech was already in place for comprehensive simultaneous translation, it would have been very simple to include an audio description in the access provision. Indeed, if we think of AD as a translation service rather than (or as well as) an access service, all multi-lingual conferences might be more inclined to include it as a matter of course. I'm looking forward to seeing this put in place for the next CAFE conference in 2021 which I very much hope to attend. </span></span></div>
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-72141752849939203422018-10-05T11:33:00.000+01:002018-11-15T10:11:55.676+00:00Blindness Gain and the Art of Non-Visual Reading<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>This is the text of my inaugural lecture, 'Blindness Gain and the Art of Non-Visual Reading', which I delivered at Royal Holloway on 30 October 2018.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>An image of me delivering my inaugural lecture</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When we think of blindness in
nineteenth-century-French literature, we think first of its presence in
canonical texts. We think of Gustave Flaubert’s grotesque blind beggar who
haunts Madame Bovary; we think of Charles Baudelaire’s “awful” and “vaguely
ridiculous” Blind Men from <i>The Flowers of
Evil</i> who are objects of scrutiny, speculation and pity. We think of the
dramatic ending of the first volume of Eugène Sue’s monumental serial novel <i>The Mysteries of Paris </i>in which the
enigmatic main character Rodolphe decides to blind the escaped convict and
murderer known as the School Master as punishment for the grisly crimes he has
committed. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #222222; font-style: italic;">Le maitre d’école aveuglé
pour ses nombreux crimes, par </span><a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Gustave_Staal" style="font-style: italic;" title="Pierre Gustave Staal"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #0b0080;">Staal</span></a><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #222222; font-style: italic;"> gravé par </span><a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Adrien_Lavieille" style="font-style: italic;" title="Jacques Adrien Lavieille"><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #0b0080;">Lavieille</span></a><span lang="FR" style="background: white; color: #222222;"><i> dans les Œuvres illustrées d'Eugène Sue,
1850. </i><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SchoolmasterBlindedMysteriesParis.jpg">(wikimedia commons image)</a></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;">This mage is for the visually
dependent amongst you; those of you who seek something to look at whilst you
listen to me. Audio description is usually provided separately for blind and
partially blind people via headsets in cinemas and theatres and through special
tours in museums and galleries. I am going to provide audio description for
everyone because as we will see, an awareness of the pleasures and pitfalls of
audio description, and the language we use when putting the visual into words
has immense benefits for non-blind people. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Here I am showing an engraving from
the 1850 illustrated edition of Sue’s novel: the School Master is bound tightly
to a chair as Rodolphe sentences him with his pointed finger. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">Rather than hand him over to the
French judicial system, where he would be sentenced to death, Rodolphe decides
that blinding the School Master is a more fitting punishment. This is indeed a
fate worse than death: the once formidable criminal is now weak, defenceless
and isolated: he has only his guilt and remorse for company as he lives out his
days as a pitiful and dependant invalid.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It will come as no surprise to those
of you who know me that I find this depiction of blindness both shocking and
offensive. You will also not be surprised to learn that in French and English
literature blindness has almost always been associated with a whole range of
negative stereotypes – stereotypes which add up to what David Bolt calls <i>The Metanarrative of Blindness</i>. What is
more surprising, and more worrying, is that most people (including some of you
listening to me now) still believe that blindness is a dreadful affliction
which reduces a person’s chances of a happy and successful life. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is no doubt that blindness has
its challenges. It is inconvenient, time-consuming and costly to be a blind
person living in a non-blind world and sudden blindness, particularly in
adulthood, can feel devastating. But blindness is not a tragedy and it is not a
fate worse than death. Blindness is a valuable and important way of being in
the world. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">As the protagonist of Tahar Ben
Jelloun’s </span><i style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">The Sacred Night</i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"> puts it,
“I try to make blindness into an asset and I do not see it as a disability.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My term "blindness gain" is inspired
by the notion of “deaf gain” coined by Bauman and Murray as well as by
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of “disability gain” and Georgina Kleege’s
reflections on “gaining blindness” rather than ‘losing sight’. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">Blindness gain is the idea that rather
than thinking of blindness as a problem to be solved, we think of blindness as
a benefit. Blind and partially blind people benefit from access to a
multisensory way of being which celebrates inventiveness, imagination and
creativity. Non-visual living is an art. But blindness gain is also about how
blindness can benefit non-blind people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The audio book is a powerful example
of "blindness gain". Thanks to the activism of previous generations of blind
people who worked to secure access to books in audio form, blind people now
have access to thousands of audio books. As the audio book has become
mainstream, non-blind people have gained access to the conveniences and
pleasures of this new format.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Today I would like to share two other
examples of blindness gain with you: close- reading and what that tells us
about the non-visual text, and the art of creative audio description. </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">When I read books rather than
listening to them, I use magnification to make them accessible to me. This means
that I read only a couple of words at a time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQEwE_hzuoCkbnVhjAt1XyeP2cCv7NTAKwxSgTR00rBPFIDS3NdlPdcjZlzbOzWcd2mRRtHWFNxp35WTY5ik3-RJNrjRc-4kU2zlWGcyEH4QmNYqJgYNxTxRbVqwlzs9ojtv3neO6PFDs/s1600/IMG_4313+%2528002%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="538" data-original-width="404" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQEwE_hzuoCkbnVhjAt1XyeP2cCv7NTAKwxSgTR00rBPFIDS3NdlPdcjZlzbOzWcd2mRRtHWFNxp35WTY5ik3-RJNrjRc-4kU2zlWGcyEH4QmNYqJgYNxTxRbVqwlzs9ojtv3neO6PFDs/s320/IMG_4313+%2528002%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here I am showing an image
of my kindle. The screen is set to maximum magnification and we read the
following sentence: “They say - , you know, they say, ‘What’s the story? What’s
the scoop with the blindness.” from Rod Michalko’s recent book <i>Things Are Different Here</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This close-reading means that I focus
on the details of a literary text’s use of language rather than its broader
context or place in literary history. In his <i>Literary Memoirs</i>, nineteenth-century French writer Maxime du Camp
divides literary description into two types, “the short-sighted school and the
long-sighted school”. Camp’s formulation can just as easily be applied to
reading. Indeed, his description of the short-sighted school is very like the
way magnification mediates my own relationship with what I read:</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Short sighted people see the tiny
things, they study each contour, prioritize each thing because each thing
appears to them in isolation; they are surrounded by a kind of cloud onto which
each object is projected in apparently excessive proportions; it is as if they
have a microscope in their eye which magnifies everything. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Camp’s description of the importance
of detail to the short-sighted reader is an example of blindness gain because
it encourages us to value non-normative ways of accessing information. French
literature’s blind characters perform a similar function.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Honoré de Balzac’s 1844 novel <i>Modeste Mignon</i>, the blind mother of the
eponymous heroine announces to the family that she can identify a change in
Modeste’s behaviour invisible to the novel’s non-blind characters. It is the
mother’s detection and explanation of this change that allows the reader to
understand why Modeste is suddenly behaving as she is. Without the perceptions
of the blind mother, the story of Modeste’s secret passion for a Parisian poet
would be unintelligible. Although Balzac’s use of the blind mother in this way mobilises
two negative stereotypes of blindness – the blind clairvoyant and the myth of
supernatural compensation - it also foregrounds the creative power of blindness
by allowing a blind character to advance the novel’s plot with her non-visual
observations. Nineteenth-century French realism, not unlike the French
nineteenth century more generally, was a highly visual phenomenon. Balzac was France’s
most prolific realist novelist and his work shares his country’s - and his century’s
- ocularcentrism. Yet his novels are also a celebration of the power of
non-visual reading. The eponymous hero of <i>Facino
Cane </i>is also blind. His blindness makes him both more legible and more narratively
interesting:</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Imagine the plaster mask resembling
Dante lit by the red glow of the oil lamp, and topped by a forest of
silvery-white hair. The bitter and painful expression on this magnificent face
was heightened by its blindness; for the dead eyes relived through thoughts; it
was as if a burning light was emanating from them which was produced by a
unique and incessant desire which was energetically inscribed on the bulging
forehead criss-crossed by wrinkles resembling an old wall’s foundations.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The importance accorded by the
narrator to Cane’s appearance, as well as his call for the reader to picture
the figure in her mind’s eye, reinforces the ocularcentric notion that seeing
leads to knowing. And because his pale face reminds him of a statue of Dante,
the narrator assumes that Cane’s blindness has given him the talent for
creative insight associated with the poet. Yet his words in fact undermine
realism’s belief in the predominance of the visual by according the blind man a
significance which the ocularcentric realist narrative should logically deny
him. By inviting us to elevate the blind man to the position of author figure, Balzac
paradoxically emphasizes that the ability to physically see is not a
prerequisite for a realist narrator. By choosing to use a blind character as a
fictional representation of himself, Balzac is erasing powerfully negative
connotations of blindness. He is collapsing the gulf traditionally created by
the hierarchical binary opposition which values seeing above not-seeing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This description of Cane further
challenges realism’s sight-based doctrine by suggesting that although Cane’s
eyes do not function to gather knowledge about the visible world, they are not
useless: they have the power to
communicate information about the hidden world. They can detect things which
are inaccessible to the sight-dependant narrator and reader. This description of
Cane thus reveals that blindness can represent a different way of thinking or
even being, a way of gathering information which is more effective than the
ocularcentric methods usually associated with realism. As the narrator points
out:</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">“I believe that blindness speeds up
intellectual communication by preventing attention from wdering onto external
objects”. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">By suggesting here that blind people can have a superior intellectual
focus precisely because they are not distracted by the physical appearance of
the world around them, this description undermines realism’s building blocks by
questioning the detailed interest in appearance which is valued by both the
narrator and by Balzac himself. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">Balzac’s blind man represents a
different kind of narrator: he rejects straightforward seeing and instead
offers us a celebration of the creative potential of the non-visual.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Victor Hugo’s late work <i>The Man Who Laughs</i> is an extension of this
celebration of the creative potential of the blind narrator. Hugo tells the
story of Gwynplaine, a street performer who was calculatingly disfigured as a
child as a way of making money. Hugo’s representation of Gwynplaine’s blind
love Dea again reveals that blindness can lead to more enlightened ways of
seeing. At first glance, Dea conforms to a widespread nineteenth-century vision
of the passive and malleable blind girl: she is beautiful, gentle, kind and
utterly devoted to Gwynplaine. She also possesses some of the qualities of the
traditional blind clairvoyant: she is spiritual and mystical and seems to have
an uncanny connection with another world. Hugo uses a vocabulary usually
associated with sight to describe Dea’s non-seeing eyes:</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Her eyes, which were large and clear,
were dull for her but strangely illuminated for others. Mysterious blazing
torches which only lit up the outside. She gave out light, she who had none of
her own.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">By using the imagery of light to
describe Dea’s blind eyes, Hugo challenges our understanding of the difference
between light and dark. Familiar binary oppositions collapse as light becomes
the concept most associated with Dea’s blindness. As well as reminding us that
blind people are not necessarily engulfed in darkness, Hugo’s language suggests
that Dea, like Balzac’s Cane, can both notice and communicate information not
accessible to her non-blind peers. Like
Balzac’s blind characters, Dea fulfils the role of narrator-surrogate because
she is able to provide information to her spectator-readers. Whilst non-blind people
see things superficially and are thus first amused and then horrified by Gwynplaine’s
deformed face, Dea sees below surface appearance to the elements of Gwynplaine
which really matter and yet which most non-blind people remain ‘blind’ to: </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">"Only one woman on earth could see
Gwynplaine. It was this blind woman”. This reference to Dea’s second sight is yet
another evocation of the myth of supernatural compensation as well as an
example of the ‘seeing-knowing’ synonymy problematized by Bolt’s ‘metanarrative
of blindness’. But Dea’s access to non-visual knowledge also emphasizes that
the act of physically looking at someone is over-valued because it is not
necessarily an effective way of gaining accurate information about them. For Victor
Hugo, blindness is less about what a person does or does not see, and more
about how a person exists in relation to other people. In a powerful
foreshadowing of the social model of disability, Hugo recognises that blindness
is a socially constructed phenomenon. Hugo’s novel, like my work, is a call for
a redefinition of blindness which acknowledges its ability to both generate and
communicate narrative.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">Like Balzac and
Hugo, Emile Zola is a very visual novelist. Unlike them, he does not include
any blind characters in his work. But Zola unwittingly provides us with another
example of ‘blindness gain’. Zola’s close friendship with Paul Cezanne gave him
a passion for Impressionist painting. And this passion is translated in his
novels into some of the best examples of creative audio description that I have
ever found. Museums and galleries are increasingly providing audio descriptions
for blind visitors. But their efforts are not always successful. Putting
pictures into words is a difficult business. If every viewer looks at a picture
in their own way, how can any description hope to capture not only how a
painting looks, but also how it makes us feel? In his 1885 novel </span><i style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">The Masterpiece</i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">, Zola describes
fictionalized versions of some of Edouard Manet’s most famous paintings. His
painter-protagonist Claude spends the early part of the novel battling to
finish a version of Manet’s </span><i style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">The Luncheon
on the Grass</i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">. As Claude paints he becomes another narrator surrogate, as he
provides a series of creative audio descriptions of his work. Claude is an
accomplished describer because he can capture different ways of seeing his art.
In this first description Zola uses free indirect style to capture the joyful
novelty of the painting:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As a sketch, it was remarkable for
its vigour, its spontaneity, and the lively warmth of its colour. It showed the
sun pouring into a forest clearing, with a solid background of greenery and a
dark path running off to the left and with a bright spot of light in the far
distance. Lying on the grass in the foreground, among the lush vegetation of
high summer, was the naked figure of a woman. […] while in the foreground, to
make the necessary contrast, the artist had seen fit to place a man’s figure.</span></span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This description does not necessarily
allow us to see the picture in our mind’s eye. But does this really matter?
Creative audio description is an attempt to capture how a picture makes us
feel. Here Claude appreciates the fresh colours of the ‘open air’ movement. But
when the picture is exhibited at the <i>salon
des refusés</i>, it is laughed at by the bourgeois audience. As well as
reminding us that a picture’s reception is influenced by its surroundings, this
second description captures Claude’s disappointment when he sees the painting displayed
in public for the first time:</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It looked yellower in the light that
filtered through the white cotton screen; it looked somehow smaller, too, and
cruder, and at the same time more laboured […]; the man in the black jacket was
all wrong, he was over-painted and badly posed; the best thing about him was
his hand, […]. The trees and the sunlit glade he liked, and the naked women
lying on the grass he found so resplendent with life that she looked like
something above and beyond his capacities, […]. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When taken together, these
descriptions provide a multi-layered account of the painting which provides
both blind and non-blind readers with a detailed impression of it. Creative AD
is an example of ‘blindness gain’ whose benefits should be embraced for all
museum visitors. The kind of creative AD modelled in these examples from Zola
encourages discussion and dialogue about art and about the language we use to
describe it; it breaks down barriers between visitors and the art on display; it
provides creative content for museums and encourages conversations between
blind and non-blind people. Until creative AD is as ubiquitous as the audio
book, we could do worse than turn to Zola’s prose for a sense of what looking
at Impressionism feels like.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 36pt;">If Balzac, Hugo
and Zola all illustrate the art of non-visual reading in different ways, my
final example, Lucien Descaves, wrote the best French example of a non-visual
novel. </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">Descaves’ 1894 novel </span><i style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">The Trapped</i><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;"> is a detailed and carefully
researched account of how blind people live. The novel is minute in its
attention to detail and includes information about practical issues which
non-blind people tend to be interested in (but afraid to ask about) such as how
a blind person reads, shops, threads a needle, plays cards, earns money and
gets around Paris. In keeping with my myopic approach to texts, it is
Descaves’s non-visual style which interests me here. The novel tells the story
of blind musician Savinien. In order to provide his reader with a detailed
understanding of how his blind protagonist relates to the world, Descaves’
descriptions are much more focused on touch, smell, sound and taste than they
are on sight. The description of Savinien’s future wife Annette demonstrates
that the novelist has no need to refer to physical appearance in order to
describe his characters. Rather than tell us what Annette looks like, the
narrator focuses instead on a description of her voice because this is what
Savinien first notices:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Annette’s voice, […] evoked those
everyday natural white wines which have a bouquet of gun flint and sandstone.
At first it was surprising and not very nice. But, in the ear which had gulped
it down it left a ‘refrain’, a feeling of sharpish coolness which was so
exquisite that a second mouthful was enough to render it eminently quaffable.
The expression ‘To drink in someone’s words’ which sighted people used, at last
made sense to Savinien: he was drinking in this voice and </span></span>reveling<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> in every last
drop of it.</span></span></blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This description is striking for the
layering of sense impressions which Descaves uses to capture the intensity of
Savinien’s feelings. Once his sense of hearing has been mobilised by the sound
of Annette’s voice, its effect on him is described through a synaesthetic
allusion to the sense of taste whose impression is then evoked through references
to the sense of smell. The playful meta-reference to language in the expression
‘to drink in someone’s words’ foregrounds the narrator’s knowing use of this
kind of multi-sensorial layering to evoke an effect whose immediacy it is
difficult to capture in words. As Savinien’s attraction for Annette grows,
Descaves adds his sense of touch to the senses of smell, hearing and taste
already evoked. By encompassing all four senses within this extended metaphor
of the violin player he further captures the intensity of his feelings without
recourse to the visual:</span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The young woman’s bow had thus far
only made the strings of smell, hearing and by extension the E-string of taste
resonate within him. As she touched him, it was the turn of his sense of touch
to gently vibrate. And as if this human violin had been awaiting the decisive
participation of this particular note before speaking, the perfect chord was
reached at last in the minor key characterised by the agreeably tart traits shared
by his impressions of smell, sound and taste. These impressions were then
combined with the sensation caused by the touch of that small hand which was
both dry and gentle, delicate and firm, tart, yes, like the bewitching
combination of her voice and her lilac perfume.</span></span></blockquote>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are never told what Annette looks
like. But this hardly seems to matter. These powerful multisensory descriptions
provide us with all the information we need. Like Savinien, we operate without
the sense of sight. And like him we feel no sense of deprivation or loss. Quite
the opposite. By gaining blindness we are gifted rich and sensual access to deeply
evocative prose.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As well as celebrating non-visual
reading in his descriptions, Descaves also celebrates it in the material
production of the novel. Whilst reading the first edition of the novel in the
Taylorian Library in Oxford I made a surprising discovery. At the novel’s
climax, Descaves took the highly unusual decision to include a page of braille
in the novel itself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Here I am showing a picture of the page of braille </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>which I found bound inside the first edition. </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At the climax of the novel, Savinien
returns home to an empty house. When his non-blind wife fails to return for
supper, Savinien cobbles together some leftovers and sits down to eat at his
usual place at the table. As he is eating, his wandering hand comes across a
piece of paper covered in braille. As first he ignores it, thinking it must be
some old notes he had left lying around. But then his fingers return to it and
read it more carefully: he is shocked and shaken by its contents. In the 1894
edition of the novel that I read, this crucial letter is reproduced in braille
and inserted into the novel just before Savinien’s discovery of it is
described. The placement of the letter is significant because its contents are
not revealed in the body of the text until four pages after Savinien first
reads it. So, at this crucial moment in the story only a braille reader has
access to information which is deliberately denied the non-braille reader.
Descaves’s decision to include this letter is intriguing. The rest of the novel
is in print and thus inaccessible to a blind person except via the intermediary
of a non-blind reader. A braille edition of the novel was published in the late
nineteenth century, but blind readers at the time make no reference to the
extraordinary presence of the letter – presumably because it is not noticeable
if the rest of the novel is also in braille.
Perhaps Descaves’ decision to include a braille letter in the print
edition of the novel is merely a quirky celebration of the medium of braille or
a kind of tactile illustration to give his non-blind readers a sense of what
reading braille feels like. But given the practical and financial implications
of the letter’s inclusion, as well as Descaves’ commitment to changing non-blind
people’s attitude to blindness, I think that his decision to include the letter
demonstrates his desire to undermine his non-blind readers’ dependence on, and privileging
of the sense of sight. Throughout the book, Descaves depicts blind people’s
struggles for equality and fair treatment in fascinating detail. He is
particularly interested in the opportunities provided for blind people to earn
a decent wage and to live independently and he is especially empathetic towards
those characters who fight for the rights of blind people by challenging the
assumptions of ocularcentric French society. But the non-blind reader’s own
reliance on sight – which allows us to read the book in the first place -
necessarily also contributes to, and perpetuates, the ocularcentric society
which Descaves is seeking to criticise. The non-blind reader can thus only
really understand this unfair exclusion of blind people when she experiences it
for herself by being put into an analogous situation of exclusion. Descaves
cleverly uses the braille letter as a means of purposefully withholding crucial
plot-related information from the non-braille reader. The non-blind reader is
excluded from information – because it is in a format inaccessible to her – and
thus frustrated in her attempts to make sense of Savinien’s reactions to a
letter which she cannot read. In this moment the non-blind reader understands
what it feels like to be a blind person in a society that is heavily reliant on
print as a means of communication. As well as describing the unfamiliar
experience of blindness, Descaves uses this letter to transport non-blind
readers into the world inhabited by the blind protagonists of the novel so that
they experience – albeit temporarily – what it feels like to be excluded from
an essential piece of information through no fault of their own. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This evening we have met several blind
characters who have all provided us with non-visual ways of relating to the
world. Their blindness has given us multi-sensory accounts of the world that are
not usually available to visually dependent people. We have seen how non-visual
reading is indeed an art-form. I hope that these examples of ‘blindness gain’ have
encouraged you to reconsider your own preconceived notions of vision and its
place in the hierarchy of the senses. I hope that you can think of blindness not
in terms of loss but in terms of gain. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<i>With thanks to the eminent French researcher and doyenne of blind history, Zina Weygand, who delivered a vote of thanks after the lecture.</i></div>
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Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-13218175886643257692018-09-05T18:24:00.003+01:002018-09-05T18:24:39.515+01:00Blindness Arts: a Disability Studies Quarterly Special IssueCo-organizing the 2015 <a href="https://blindcreations.blogspot.com/">Blind Creations</a> conference with Vanessa Warne was one of the highlights of my academic career. As <a href="https://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/2015/07/blind-creations-pride-nostalgia-and.html">this post</a> written in the conference's aftermath shows, the event was memorable above all for the sense of celebratory community it created. Almost as soon as the conference was over, Vanessa and I began making plans to continue the many productive conversations which started during those few summer days in Egham. We did not want or need to produce a traditional 'conference proceedings': our wonderful <a href="https://blindcreations.blogspot.com/p/audio-archive.html">audio archive</a> means that all the papers delivered at the conference are still available. Instead we wanted to extend the legacy of <i>Blind Creations</i> by publishing new work which responds to questions raised by our speakers in 2015. Just over three years after the conference, we are pleased and proud to announce the publication of a special issue of <i>Disability Studies Quarterly </i>which we have called 'Blindness Arts'. In our co-authored <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6480/5071">Introduction</a> we explain that this title functions "in contrast with and as a companion to ‘visual arts'". This extract from later in the Introduction gives a flavour of the intersections between blindness, creativity, performance and access which the issue explores:<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the first section of our issue, we share a set of essays that explore methods for accessing cultural works. These essays take up a range of media, namely sculpture, film, theatre and the comic book, all of which have traditionally been understood as visual forms. The authors in this section challenge this overly narrow perception and share experiments with both audio description and the role of touch. As Fayen d’Evie’s and Georgina Kleege’s individual contributions to blindness studies are noted by other authors throughout our issue, it is fitting that we begin with <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6483/5090">their co-authored essay</a>, in which they share their work on tactile interpretations of the collections at the KADIST Art Foundation, and call for new opportunities and methods for touching art. Like d’Evie and Kleege, Hannah Thompson also calls for a collaborative approach to blind access. In <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6487/5085">her essay on audio description</a> (AD) in cinema, she engages with four films with blind protagonists in order to compare extradiegetic and intradiegetic approaches to AD and to argue for its creative potential. Louise Fryer also explores the possibilities and challenges of integrated AD by <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6490/5093">sharing her experiences</a> as an audio describer who, in a break with traditional models of objectivity and neutrality, took an active role in a play written and performed by a blind theatre group. Arseli Dokumaci <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6491/5095">shares a video project and essay</a> that together use an exploration of the everyday travel strategies of two disabled people to propose an AD practice shaped by crip time. The final essay in this section, <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6477/5089">Brandon Christopher’s comparative study</a> of an audio version of a conventional comic and of Philipp Meyer’s tactile comic Life, explores audio and tactile access questions raised in other essays in this section and extends our issue’s exploration of blindness arts to include the comic book genre. Remaining attentive to questions of access, we turn in the next section to the experiences of artists and to works of art that comment on blindness, either explicitly or through their use of design elements associated with blindness. Sculptor Aaron McPeake opens this section by <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6479/5094">reflecting on the making, exhibition and reception of his works in bronze</a>, offering insight into the role of sound and touch in experiences of them. The role of touch is also important to the art made by Florian Grond and David Johnson. In <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6474/5091">the issue’s second co-authored piece</a>, they share their experiences as artists collaborating at a distance and they reflect on the central role of blindness in their creation of accessible art. As blind artists, both McPeake and Johnson have encountered sighted misunderstandings of their practices. In <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6485">an essay</a> that responds to the misrepresentation of blind artists and their working lives, Catalin Brylla proposes filmmaking methods that challenge supercrip narratives and make possible nuanced depictions of the creative lives of artists who are blind. <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6471/5087">In an essay </a>on the contemporary proliferation of braille as a design element in creative works, including public art installations, made by and for sighted people, Vanessa Warne explores the appropriation of braille as a visual code. Heather Tilley <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6475/5096">offers an historical perspective</a> on the visual depiction of blind people, analyzing nineteenth-century images of blind people reading by touch and messages about blindness that the visual record shares. A pair of essays in our final section explores different kinds of performances that have been shaped by blindness. <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6473/5088">Piet Devos analyzes</a> two non-visual contemporary dance pieces and his experiences of them. He also discusses the practice of blind dancer Saïd Gharbi. Offering a personal reflection on her own vocal practice, Emily K. Michael <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6476">moves between sacred and secular spaces</a> to map the relationship between blindness, vocal performance and persistent myths of compensatory ability. We close the volume with <a href="http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6481/5086">a co-authored essay by Rod Michalko and Tanya Titchkosky</a> that uses a trans-Atlantic journey and a dialogue between the authors to explore the theme of travelling blind and the ways that blindness transforms sighted understandings of the world when it enters into dialogue with them. The presence in this final essay of a series of ‘excurses’ functions as a kind of crip time, similar to the audio description method proposed by Dokumaci. In both cases, the contents of the narrative are translated into a different format so that an ableist timeframe is replaced with space for creative reflection. </blockquote>
Unlike much academic writing, this volume is free, open access and accessible. Please read, enjoy, respond and share widely. Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-34613732188579554092018-07-04T14:49:00.000+01:002018-07-04T14:49:36.061+01:00Multisensory Museums: Volunteers Wanted!As part of a research project I am running over the summer, we are offering volunteers the chance to come and experience a truly multisensory and immersive museum or gallery visit. See below for details of two experiments you can get involved in!<br />
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<b>1) Egham Museum</b><br />
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T<i>his is an image of a late-nineteenth-century magnetic electric shock machine such as the one used in Thomas Holloway's sanatorium at Virginia Water.*</i></div>
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If you are interested in taking part in a multisensory exhibition of a Magnetic Electric Shock Machine, come along to the <a href="https://eghammuseum.org/">Egham Museum</a> and participate in our free research event! Refreshments will be provided. Egham Museum will be open to volunteers on July 17th and 19th from 10am-4pm, and on July 26th from 12pm-8pm: come and open your senses to new ways of experiencing the museum. For any queries or for more information, please contact <a href="mailto:Ella.Turner.2013@live.rhul.ac.uk">Ella Turner</a> or <a href="mailto:Stephen.Pearce.2010@live.rhul.ac.uk">Stephen Pearce</a>.<br />
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<b>2) Royal Holloway Picture Gallery</b><br />
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<i>This is an image of Edwin Henry Landseer's 1864 painting 'Man Proposes, God Disposes'.* </i></div>
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Come along to the <a href="https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/art-collections/">Picture Gallery</a> to participate in our research event. Everyone is welcome to experience a multisensory exhibition of the infamous ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’. The study will take approximately 20 minutes and involves a quick questionnaire. The Picture Gallery will be open to volunteers on July 20th and 23rd from 10am-4pm. Refreshments will be provided and volunteers who have signed up in advance will receive a £10 amazon voucher. To sign-up as a volunteer or for any more information, please contact <a href="mailto:Ella.Turner.2013@live.rhul.ac.uk">Ella Turner</a> or <a href="mailto:Stephen.Pearce.2010@live.rhul.ac.uk">Stephen Pearce</a>.<div>
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*<i>I usually provide descriptions for any images I include in blog posts: in this case I can't, as doing so might skew the results of our experiments.... </i><br /><div>
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Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-92031208031175572682017-10-18T11:33:00.002+01:002017-10-18T11:33:48.747+01:00The Man Booker Prize for (Audio) Fiction<span style="font-family: inherit;">The winner of the 2017 <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/fiction">Man Booker Prize for Fiction</a> is <i>Lincoln in the Bardo </i>by George Saunders. It is a clever, moving and deeply imaginative book and a worthy winner. But if the judges had read the shortlisted books by ear rather than by eye it would not have won. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This year I listened to all 6 shortlisted books and chose my own winner based on what I heard. I was using the same literary-merit criteria as the judges, but I added another element that sight-focused readers couldn't take into account: how the audio version of the book contributed to the reading experience. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Audio books used to be the preserve of bind people. When I was a child, they were a rare and precious thing. Now they are mainstream. Publishers routinely produce downloadable audio books alongside kindle and paper versions and a lot of (sighted) people prefer them; <a href="https://www.audible.co.uk/">audible</a> is a thriving amazon company and public libraries are finally making audio books available to download via apps like <a href="https://app.overdrive.com/">overdrive</a> and <a href="https://meet.libbyapp.com/">Libby</a>. And with popularity come production values. The audio books of my youth were little more than a voice on tape. Now publishers go to great lengths to create a memorable reading experience. They carefully choose a narrator (or narrators) whose voice matches the feel of the story. Sometimes they even add music. Yet despite the popularity of audio books, they are still not taken seriously by 'serious' (aka sighted) readers. When I tell my literature students and colleagues that I read books by ear they are skeptical. 'Audio books send me to sleep,' they say. 'How do you remember what you read?' they ask. This cynicism is insulting because it implies that blind people cannot engage with literature to the same extent as sighted people. More </span>worryingly<span style="font-family: inherit;">, it misses one of the points of prose. All the writers shortlisted for the Man Booker care deeply about how their prose sounds. The content of their book is important, but so is its form. They are all writer-poets who crafted their words for rhythm and rhyme as well as sense. Their audio books are the perfect place to experience the beauty of this prose. Yet they are still seen as less 'authemtic', less 'proper' than the printed 'original'. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Lincoln in the Bardo </i>would not have won an audio Booker because it was almost impossible to follow by ear. Apparently the printed format of the book is 'disconcerting': this is even more the case for the audio version. So much so that I gave up listening twice before I finally got through it. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">According to audible, the book's 'dazzling chorus of voices' was captured by a '</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">166-person full cast featuring award-winning actors and musicians, as well as a number of Saunders' family, friends, and members of his publishing team'. This may sound impressive in a press-release but it leads to a wholly unfeasible listening experience. Even if I were endowed with the mythical super-hearing erroneously attributed to blind people, I would not be able to </span>recognize<span style="font-family: inherit;"> and attribute 166 different voices. When I listened I only got the vaguest sense of who was speaking, and I learnt more about the story from audible's synopsis than from what I actually heard. This </span>audio book<span style="font-family: inherit;"> probably works brilliantly as an accompaniment to or adaptation of the printed novel. But if audio is your own way of accessing this text, then you will be frustrated and alienated by it. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The other 5 shortlisted books all make the much more sensible decision to stick with just one audio narrator. Of these, </span><i>History<span style="font-family: inherit;"> of Wolves </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Emily Fridlund and </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Elmet </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">by Fiona Mozley are first-person narratives told by adolescents and both are read by audio-narrators whose voices have the age, gender and accent of their book's narrator: a young North American woman (Caitlin Thornburn) for </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Wolves </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">and a young Northern English man (Gareth Bennett-Ryan) for </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Elmet</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. The fit between fictional and audio voices creates a close bond between listener and storyteller because both audio-narrators do an excellent job of capturing the tone of their protagonists. I am sure that my listening experience of these two novels was more captivating and immersive than that of my sight-reliant peers.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Ali Smith's <i>Autumn </i>is written in the third person, but much of the story is told from the perspective of the novel's protagonist, 32-year-old Elisabeth Demand, using free indirect style. The audio-narrator, Melody Grove, sounds close to Elisabeth in age and provenance, but she also manages to capture other key characters such as 8-year-old Elisabeth, Daniel, and Elisabeth's mother using changes in tone and inflection. <i>Autumn</i> works as an audio book because it has several underlying thematic threads which hold it together; it felt like the audio-narrator understands this and cleverly emphasizes them in her reading.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><i>Exit West </i>by Mohsin Hamid is also written in the third person but it is less successful than <i>Autumn </i>because it has not one but two protagonists: Nadia and Saeed. The presence of two characters of different genders makes the choice of audio-narrator difficult. If a male narrator is chosen, there is a risk that the listener feels closer to Saeed's story, whereas a female narrator will create a bond which favours Nadia's perspective. In the end, anglo-Indian actor Ashley Kumar was probably cast as audio-narrator because his voice resonates with both the novel's context and the author's persona. Despite the captivating and timely story, and the characters' powerful portrayals, I felt a distance between audio narrator and listener in this book which I did not experience in <i>Autumn.</i></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">At 37 hours long, Paul Auster's <i>4321 </i>takes about as long to listen to as the other 5 put together, and what a delight it was. <i>4321 </i></span>is the only shortlisted book entirely narrated by its author. (Apparently George Saunders is one of <i>Lincoln</i>'s 166 voices but I couldn't tell which one). When it is done well, as it is here, author-narration works brilliantly. No-one understands how a book should sound better than its author. I was seduced by Auster's narration of Ferguson's lives from very early on in the narrative. Not only did his voice match the main character's personas, his intimate knowledge of the text added a dimension of fluency and connection which brought another layer of emotion and understanding to the reading experience. For this reason, <i>4321 </i>would be my audio Booker winner, with <i>History of Wolves, Elmet </i>and <i>Autumn </i>close behind.<br />
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As more and more people choose audio books over print versions, it seems crucial to include an audio reader among the Man Booker judges. I would happily volunteer.<br />
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-34900793361608820642017-09-07T09:35:00.000+01:002017-09-07T09:41:21.411+01:00Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction out now!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This image shows the front cover of </i>Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction <i>by Hannah Thompson. Above the title, a hand is shown reading a sheet of Braille. </i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am delighted to announce that my book <i>Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction</i> has been published by <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137435101#otherversion=9781137435118">Palgrave</a> in their <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/gb/series/14821">Literary Disability Studies series.</a> <br /><br />In this work I show how and why French fiction is fascinated with visions of blindness by identifying and analysing the complicated relationship between writers, readers and fictions of blindness that permeates French fiction. Blindness is a mysterious phenomenon. It arouses curiosity and invites discussion. It is also a multi-layered and multi-faceted collection of narratives. Writers are drawn to blindness precisely because blindness itself is a collection of stories. The stereotypes, clichés and misconceptions which constitute what most non-blind people describe as “blindness”, have been described by <a href="https://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/david-bolt-metanarrative-of-blindness.html">David Bolt as a literary “metanarrative”.</a> Whilst many French depictions of blindness reinforce and conform to the various strands of Bolt's mostly negative metanarrative, my work focuses on more positive depictions which question, undermine or deconstruct the prevailing myths of blindness. I re-view a selection of the most interesting, surprising and moving depictions of blindness in French fiction by authors including Brigitte Aubert, Honoré de Balzac, Georges Bataille, Tonino Benacquista, Maxime du Camp, Lucien Descaves, André Gide, Jean Giono, Hervé Guibert, Victor Hugo, Thérèse-Adèle Husson, Paul Margueritte, Guy de Maupassant, Marc Monnier, Maurice Renard, Didier Van Cauwelaert, Fred Vargas and Romain Villet. <br /><br />Works by these authors contest and overturn received ideas of blindness through both the form and the content of their fiction. When blindness sheds its metaphorical meanings and exists as part of a narrative on its own terms, it becomes a positive signifier of change, desire, success and enhanced subjectivity. <br /><br /><b>Overview:</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Chapter 1: Introduction</b><br />I begin my re-viewing of French fictional depictions of blindness by calling for a rejection of negative misconceptions of blindness. The most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which challenge stereotypes of blindness and the emerging field of Critical Disability Studies provides us with the theoretical tools needed to do this.<br /><br /><b>Chapter 2: The French Metanarrative of Blindness</b><br />I survey those literary depictions of blindness which reinforce the metanarrative of blindness discussed by David Bolt. Maupassant’s short story ‘The Blind Man’ evokes the blindness-ignorance and blindness-darkness synonymies whilst also using nominalisation and generalisation to dehumanise its protagonist. Blind male characters are represented as weaker, less active and less able to access language than their non-blind peers. Female blind characters, on the other hand, are often portrayed as meek and passive victims of their condition. Non-blind characters routinely trick, pity and manipulate blind characters in these typhlophobic fictions of blindness. The chapter ends with an analysis of André Gide’s <i>The Pastorale Symphony</i> which shows how myths of the blind mystic and of sensory compensation emphasise blind protagonists’ otherness.<br /><br /><b>Chapter 3: The Creative ‘Look’ of the Blind ‘Seer’</b><br />This chapter marks the beginning of my sustained examination of the creative possibilities of blindness. Through close-readings of novels and short stories by Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Thérèse-Adèle Husson, I show that the unseeing gaze of the blind protagonist often transforms him or her into a surrogate narrator who is paradoxically more adept at gathering information than the sighted narrators usually present in realist texts. In works which feature blind narrators, the process of information gathering and dissemination becomes an even more overt challenge to the traditional supremacy of the sense of sight.<br /><br /><b>Chapter 4: Non-Visual Language and Descriptive Blindness</b><br />This chapter considers works by Hervé Guibert, Jean Giono, Romain Villet and Lucien Descaves which use blind characters to sensitise the reader to the descriptive power of non-visual language. In <i>Blindsight</i>, Guibert uses visually impenetrable language to stimulate his readers’ other senses whereas in <i>The Song of the World</i>, Giono mobilises the presence of a blind character to signal his use of non-visual description throughout the novel. My detailed reading of Descaves’ extraordinary novel of blindness, <i>The Trapped</i>, reveals not only that non-visual description is a highly effective way of communicating with a non-blind reader, but that Descaves includes braille in his novel in order to temporarily exclude his sighted readers.<br /><br /><b>Chapter 5: Male Desire and the Paradox of Blind Sexuality</b><br />In the first part of this chapter, I use readings of scenes of castration and pornographic pleasure from Hervé Guibert’s <i>Blindsight</i> and Georges Bataille’s <i>Story of the Eye</i> to suggest that both authors undermine the traditional dominance of the voyeuristic male gaze. In the second part, I explore how the non-visual eroticism suggested by the blindness-castration association is manifested in the descriptions of blind male desire found in Lucien Descaves’s <i>The Trapped</i> and Romain Villet’s <i>Look</i>.<br /><br /><b>Chapter 6: Silenced Sexualities: Listening to the Voice of the Blind Woman</b><br />Unlike the examples of blind male desire discussed in the previous chapter, the voices of blind female characters are much harder to hear. Blind female protagonists often remain silent in their texts: they are frequently unspeaking objects of the sighted male gaze and when they do speak, their words are often filtered through the voice of the male narrator. Detailed readings of Thérèse-Adèle Husson’s <i>Reflections</i> and Didier van Van Cauwelaert’s <i>Jules</i> shows how it is possible for a blind woman to subvert many of the stereotypes of blindness in order to express herself. <br /><br /><b>Chapter 7: Blind Assassins</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is the first of two chapters to focus on a specific literary genre, in this case the<i> roman noir</i>. Close readings of detective fiction by Fred Vargas and Brigitte Aubert show how this traditionally ocularcentric genre can be subverted by the presence of blind characters who encourage both other characters and the reader to reconsider the assumptions they routinely make about blindness. By comparing how male and female blind detective figures relate differently to the crimes they are solving, I also show, in chapters 5 and 6, that blind men and blind women are treated differently by both friends and enemies.</span></div>
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<b style="font-family: inherit;">Chapter 8: Science, Fantasy and (In)Visible Blindness</b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Science fiction’s fascination with invisibility tells us more about blindness than it does about vision. Taking Maurice Renard as my main example, my detailed readings of <i>The Blue Peril</i> and <i>The Doctored Man</i> show that rather than reinforcing the supremacy of vision in the hierarchy of the senses, narratives which present us with different ways of seeing can in fact be read as celebrations of the powers and possibilities of blindness.<br /><br /><b>Chapter 9: Conclusion</b><br />I use Tonino Benacquista’s critically acclaimed 1991 <i>roman policier</i>, <i>La commedia des rat</i></span><i>é</i><i style="font-family: inherit;">s </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">to show how French fiction’s most interesting representations of blindness are those which draw attention to a range of stereotypes of blindness before using surprising imagery, plot twists, characterization or stylistic features to undermine the reader’s expectations. This novelistic subversion encourages the reader to look again – or re-view – his or her understanding of blindness. Blindness is best understood as a multi-faceted and multi-layered collection of narratives which, when re-viewed together, testify to the powerfully creative potential of blindness. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction </i>is available as a hardback or e-book from <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137435101#otherversion=9781137435118">Palgrave </a>or <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B074XRCJSB/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1">amazon.</a> If you are interested in reviewing the book, please get in touch. </span></div>
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Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-11057882398087883072017-07-19T17:52:00.001+01:002017-07-19T17:56:06.825+01:00A Sensory Tour of the Watts GalleryAs part of my ongoing work on creative audio description, I have been collecting different ways of experiencing museums. In March I had two very different experiences at the <a href="https://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/audio-description-in-art-gallery.html">Ashmolean Museum in Oxford</a> and at the <a href="https://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/audio-description-in-art-gallery-2.html">Guildhall Museum in Rochester</a>. This weekend I took part in a sensory tour of the <a href="http://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/">Watts Gallery</a>, led by visual artist <a href="http://www.monicatakvam.com/">Monica Takvam</a>. The Watts Gallery is a collection of late-nineteenth-century painting and sculpture by British artist G F Watts, one of the leading artists of Victorian England.<br />
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When we met Monica, she explained that rather than giving us a traditional audio-described tour of the paintings, she wanted to take a much more immersive approach to the collection. Before leading us into the gallery itself, Monica asked us to think about the surrounding grounds. We were encouraged to listen to our surroundings and asked to choose words to describe our sense impressions. Once in the gallery, Monica encouraged us to break with conventional ways of experiencing art. Rather than looking at the paintings and sculptures, she asked us to smell them and to find any that smelt particularly strongly. It had never occurred to me before that even sculptures which are more than one-hundred years old still smell of their materials. Paintings too carry the smell of oil paints in them, and a stronger smell can suggest several layers of paint.<br />
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<i>This photograph shows me with my nose pressed close to Watts' cast-iron bust of Clytie</i></div>
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Instead of describing the whole collection, Monica focused on one picture, Watts' painting of Greek mythological figure Clytie. First, Monica encouraged the non-blind members of the group to participate in a collaborative description of the painting. Then she took us outside to a half-hidden sunken garden where we were able to touch a stone bust of Clytie which Watts made as a study for the painting. We also had the chance to explore the cast-iron bust pictured above. By juxtaposing painting and busts, Monica cleverly used Watts' own artistic practice to create a sensory experience of the painting.<br />
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In the final part of the tour, Monica, who is the artist-in-residence at the Watts Gallery this year, introduced us to her own work. I was particularly drawn to two photographic portraits of blind people hanging on the wall of her studio.<br />
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<i>This photograph shows one of Monica's artworks. It represents a man's head and shoulders. The man's features appear blurred because they are behind a sheet of Perspex. Holes in the Perspex form words in braille. </i></div>
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This portrait is hanging on the wall of Monica's studio at the Watts Gallery. Monica invited us to touch the Perspex cover and explore the holes pierced in it. The holes spell out words in braille but these words are too difficult for a braille reader to understand: like <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/too-big-to-feel.html">David Johnson's art installation</a> they are 'Too Big to Feel'; they are also absences rather than raised dots. Sighted viewers are just as frustrated in their quest for information. Through these holes we are given tantalising glimpses of the photograph beneath. but it is not possible to build up a complete picture of the man's face. This piece challenges both blind and non-blind ways of seeing. It remains impervious to the sighted gaze whilst also denying blind readers easy access to it. It raises questions about how we see and how we look at other people. It also creates an association between blindness and sightedness which emphasises their shared lack of perception.<br />
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<i>This photograph is a close-up of the Perspex cover with the braille holes in focus. Details from the photograph are visible through the holes whilst the portrait itself remains blurred.</i></div>
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Like her art, Monica's tour brought blindness and sightedness into dialogue. As well as myself, our group included one completely blind adult, two non-blind adults and two non-blind children. Rather than focusing on the blind members of the group, Monica included everyone: by privileging all our senses, and by thus introducing new ways of experiencing art, she encouraged everyone to rethink their relationship with visual dependency and to explore their neglected senses.Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-57310506866728939772017-06-22T12:22:00.002+01:002017-06-22T12:37:03.769+01:00The Braille Legacy: the irony of (lack of) access<span style="font-family: inherit;">When I heard that a <a href="http://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk/theatre/the-braille-legacy">French musical about the life of Louis Braille</a> was opening in London my heart sank. How, I wondered, could the production possibly avoid the stereotypes of blindness in a genre which thrives on cliche-ridden songs of sentimental pity or triumphant overcoming? Luke-warm reviews of the show confirmed my fears, as did the director's controversial decision not to cast a single blind or partially-blind actor. Disability activist MIchele Taylor <a href="https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/2017/braille-legacy-criticised-spectacular-cripping/">criticised the show</a> for its 'spectacular cripping-up' of blindness as well as for its failure to employ any blind cast or crew: she boycotted the show for these reasons. Despite not being able to attend an AD performance - out of 90 performances, only 2 were audio described and they were both on the same bank holiday weekend when I was out of town - my curiosity got the better of me...</span><br />
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...and on one level it was rather better than I was expecting. An outstanding performance by Jack Wolfe as turbulent, intelligent (and actually quite sexy) bad-boy Braille and some pretty good tunes led to an enthralling and moving evening: on the whole the play did a very good job of telling an important and little-known story. But there were also some serious problems....<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>From Vocaleye's<a href="http://vocaleyes.co.uk/events/the-braille-legacy/#player=3205&track=1" style="font-family: inherit;"> helpful introduction to the play</a> <span style="font-family: inherit;">I learnt about the over-complicated glass and wood two-storey set, the unnecessarily detailed period costumes and the fact that all the blind characters in the play wear blindfolds to </span>symbolize<span style="font-family: inherit;"> their blindness. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Wait. Blindfolds? Really? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yep. Blindfolds. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In their introduction, the describers explain that 'All
the actors in the production are sighted.
Blindness is indicated by gauzy black cloths worn as blindfolds.'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This use of blindfolds to represent physical blindness is problematic for many reasons. Firstly, it suggests that blindness is these children's only defining characteristic; their blindfolds stigmatize them, positing them as a homogeneous and marginal group who are diametrically opposed to their sighted teachers and carers. Secondly, it suggests - wrongly - that blindness is always total and always in both eyes. This use of blindfolds reminds me of the controversial use of blindness simulations to allegedly teach sighted people about blindness. <a href="http://www.visionaware.org/blog/visionaware-blog/new-research-blindness-simulation-activities-may-do-more-harm-than-good-1746/12">Researchers have recently found</a> that simulating blindness can in fact do more harm than good, and I fear that the show's use of blindfolds may have a similar effect. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But as the play progresses, the blind children sometimes remove their blindfolds, particularly when they are celebrating the invention of the braille alphabet or protesting against the </span>Institute's<span style="font-family: inherit;"> refusal to let them use braille to read. This removal suggests that the blindfolds do not in fact signify physical blindness at all. Instead they stand for the metaphorical blindness which comes from being denied access to literature and knowledge. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This association between blindness and lack of knowledge is of course equally problematic. As David Bolt explains in <i><a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/david-bolt-metanarrative-of-blindness.html">The Metanarrative of Blindness</a></i>, <span style="font-family: inherit;">t</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">he ‘seeing-knowing metaphor’ (p. 18), like the ‘blindness-darkness synonymy’ (p. 21) and the odd idea that people are either fully blind or fully sighted (pp. 69-70) all contribute to sighted society's view that blindness is an affliction in need of a cure or a tragedy in need of a happy-ending. But at least this metaphorical dimension allows the director to make the point that the children are 'blinded' less by their physical lack of sight than by society's insistence on using sighted means to communicate information. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">Importantly, as well as telling the story of the invention of braille, the plot of <i>The Braille Legacy </i>includes a sinister suggestion that an over-zealous ophthalmologist at the Institute was secretly conducting dangerous, even fatal, experiments on the children's eyes in a bid to find a 'cure' for blindness. Happily, this medicalization of blindness is countered by the play's more sympathetic characters who argue that blind children do not want or need a cure: instead all they need is a simple and universal way of accessing information. This tension between cure and societal change echoes the tension between the 'medical' and 'social' models of disability which still exists today. By associating the cure with the death of innocent children, the play controversially argues against medical intervention and in favour of improved access to literature, culture and the arts. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">Given this insistence that the blind children deserve access to knowledge, it is unspeakably ironic that the play itself was not made accessible to blind audience members. If audio-described performances are too expensive then why not include AD in the show itself? </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Surely this production would have been ideally suited to the kinds of integrated audio description deployed so effectively by theatre company </span><a href="http://www.extant.org.uk/">Extant</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">. </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #222222;">Why not use a simple set rather than a confusing structure with reflective surfaces and glaring spot lights? Things off-stage were no better. Despite the fact that the production was supported by the RNIB, I saw no evidence of braille or large-print programmes. This is a shocking omission as is the fact that </span><a href="https://www.rnib.org.uk/thebraillelegacy">the video about the play</a><span style="color: #222222;"> on the RNIB website is captioned but not audio described. If the RNIB can't lead by example then how can other organisations hope to improve access? To be fair, the front-of-house staff had clearly had some training in how to act as sighted guides, but their techniques, whilst enthusiastic, were clumsy and patronizing in places. Perhaps the play's overall lack of accessibility meant that they did not have many blind audience members to practice on...</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: white;">Overall, this production represents a massive missed opportunity: whilst the play's script convincingly calls for the emancipation of blind people, this optimistic message is completely undermined by the failure to make the production accessible. Like the embossed books which frustrate Louis in the opening scene, the play was designed by sighted people who have put no thought into the best way for blind people to access its content.</span></span><br />
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-55295823619046206872017-05-31T16:08:00.005+01:002017-05-31T16:08:55.935+01:00Precious Blindness Archive and Museum Under Threat!<br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">I began Blind Spot Blog immediately after my first research trip to the Valentin Haüy library and museum in Paris in February 2012. My </span><a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/introduction-personal-and-professional.html" style="font-family: inherit;">first post</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is full of excitement at the rare and precious books which I discovered there thanks to the archivist and curator Noëlle Roy. Noëlle retires next month and she learnt recently that she will not be replaced. This raises worrying questions about the future of the books and </span>artifacts<span style="font-family: inherit;"> in her care.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is impossible to over-state the significance of the Valentin Haüy collections. The library's founder, Maurice de la Sizeranne (1857-1924), began collecting copies of works of French literature either written by blind authors, or referring to blindness in some way, in 1886. Since then, the library has continued to acquire both fictional and non-fictional material relating to blindness and blind people in French (and to a lesser extent English) and is thus quite simply the single most important collection of literature on blindness in the world. Presumably acquisitions will cease without an archivist to manage them. Many academics, students and general readers have used the collection in their work. Zina Weygand's crucial history of blindness in France owes a significant debt to the collection as does my own forthcoming book </span><i style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9781137435101">Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction</a></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. Many of the speakers at the 2013 </span><a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/history-of-blindness-conference-updates.html" style="font-family: inherit;">History of Blindness conference</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and the 2015 </span><a href="http://blindcreations.blogspot.co.uk/" style="font-family: inherit;">Blind Creations </a><span style="font-family: inherit;">conference referenced the Valentin Haüy collections directly and most of my </span>conference<span style="font-family: inherit;"> presentations since 2012 draw on material I discovered there.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">The collections are a crucial resource for researchers but they also have huge symbolic value. They are housed at the heart of blindness history, next door to the <i>Institut national des jeunes aveugles</i> where Louis Braille was educated and where he developed his eponymous writing system. In addition, Sizeranne's decision to collect works by and about blind people transformed blindness from an affliction into a valuable means of cultural production. His collection legitimized and validated blindness as a life experience and crucially gave a voice to a group of people who had been - and continue to be - silenced by mainstream culture. Any threat to the Haüy collections is a threat to the ongoing exploration of the history of blind people. It is also a threat to research into disability history more broadly. Most importantly though, the threatened loss of access to this collection risks an erasure of the history of a marginalized and under-represented group. If people can no longer access this collection of materials by and about blind people, this history could disappear. Sizeranne began his collection to celebrate and empower blind people. It is deeply sad and </span>shocking<span style="font-family: inherit;"> that a resource that has been growing for more than 130 years is now under threat.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">It feels particularly poignant that I am writing the blog post from the Association canadienne pour les études sur le handicap (Canadian Disability Studies Association) conference in Toronto. Tomorrow I present a paper on Québécoise writer Marie-Claire Blais whose work I first encountered at the <i>bibliothèque Valentin Haü</i>y. Without the </span>Haüy collections I would not be here.<div class="MsoNormal">
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<br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you want to save the Valentin Haüy collections please e-mail the two directors of the Association <i>Valentin </i></span><i>Haüy</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> using the addresses </span><a href="mailto:president@avh.asso.fr" style="font-family: inherit;">here </a><span style="font-family: inherit;">and </span><a href="mailto:b.serre@avh.asso.fr" style="font-family: inherit;">here</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. </span><div class="MsoNormal">
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Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-70669689885442611432017-05-04T15:39:00.000+01:002017-05-04T20:26:22.301+01:00Book Review: Patient H69<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjyw5rrtsFXpUKYgMeJi8NkzxZLL3RYv1b7Dq9Ra1qAi72X8cJvFLlYWnlX6PmAFcyZ0HBfQOfyg3P9aF9PvvJBLdH2k4T0tYvbAAlcJ2HyDVx5NNyBujKEuFu1VxiJKVk35qAHUwaUCM/s1600/2016-05-05-13-51-22.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjyw5rrtsFXpUKYgMeJi8NkzxZLL3RYv1b7Dq9Ra1qAi72X8cJvFLlYWnlX6PmAFcyZ0HBfQOfyg3P9aF9PvvJBLdH2k4T0tYvbAAlcJ2HyDVx5NNyBujKEuFu1VxiJKVk35qAHUwaUCM/s320/2016-05-05-13-51-22.jpg" width="201"></a></div>
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<i>This image shows the front cover of Vanessa Potter's book. The title - Patient H69 - is presented in the style of the familiar Snellen eye chart. The subtitle - The Story of my Second Sight - and the author's name sit beneath the eye-chart letters.</i></div>
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Vanessa Potter, otherwise known as Patient H69, lost her sight suddenly over three bewildering days. In this compelling memoir, - part patient diary, part journey into and out of blindness, part popular science book - she describes how her sudden blindness made her feel, what changed as she slowly regained her sight, and how her new way of seeing has changed her outlook on the world and herself.<br>
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When Vanessa and her publisher first asked me to read and review her manuscript I was worried that I would find yet another blindness-as-tragedy, triumph-over-adversity story. But Vanessa's refusal to accept the role of passive patient-victim, the pleasure she takes in the new experiences of her 'second sight' and the humorous and articulate way she talks about her own and others' reactions to her new way of seeing, saved this book from becoming yet another self-pitying account of blindness as almost death. </div>
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There is much of interest in Vanessa's tale. Some readers will love the human-interest aspect of Vanessa's story as she describes how her illness impacts on her life as wife, mother, daughter and friend. Some readers will be fascinated by the psychological and neurological explanations which underpin Vanessa's understanding of her condition. I am most interested in what Vanessa's story of sight-loss tells us about how visually-dependent and appearance-obsessed modern society has become. </div>
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It is fascinating to see how Vanessa's attitude to blindness changes. At first, she sees blindness as unimaginably awful, so unspeakable that she bans her family from even using the 'b' word. Although the terror she feels at the possibility of going blind is entirely understandable given how visually dependent sighted people tend to be, the passion with which she articulates her fight against her failing sight nonetheless still feels like an insult to blind people. When she refers to herself as 'staring with that blank, off-centre gaze that blind people have', Vanessa not only lumps all blind people into a homogeneous, alien and unattractive group, she also refuses to relinquish her sighted status, by talking about 'them' as opposed to her. Perhaps it is this inability to see herself as blind that prevents Vanessa from accessing services for blind people. As I read the descriptions of her struggle to weigh herself, her abandonment of reading, and her attempts to write with a giant felt-tip pen I was horrified that no-one offered to help her get hold of some talking scales, an <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/my-love-affair-with-audio-books.html" target="_blank">audio book</a> subscription or the kind of free text-to-speech software I discuss <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/screen-reading.html">here.</a><br>
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After several days of total blindness, Vanessa becomes more appreciative of its nuances and wonders. At the very moment when her sight begins to return, albeit in odd, unpredictable and indescribable ways, Vanessa begins to appreciate the complexity of seeing and not seeing. Her struggle to put her new way of seeing into words is the book's most interesting part. For during this struggle she encounters society's misguided obsession with perfect sight and its consequent need to categorize people as either 'blind' or 'sighted'. Vanessa can read nothing on the Snellen eye chart. She is therefore officially blind. But she <i>can</i> see patterns, shapes, even faces. Yet the medical establishment has no way of measuring this kind of sight. By showing how seeing actually happens on a spectrum, and how it is as much about the brain as it is about the eyes, Vanessa reminds us that everyone sees things differently. No-one has perfect sight so everyone is partially blind.<br>
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Vanessa quickly learns to supplement her sight with her other senses and the enjoyment she takes in this new way of relating to the world is a precious reminder that sight is not as necessary as we often think. The multi-sensory nature of Vanessa's prose reflects her other senses' expansion. For example, her description of the sound of the nurses' shoes as an 'invisible symphony' is a clever and synaesthetic way of combining (non)sight with sound to emphasize the power of the latter over the former.<br>
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But despite this increasingly multi-sensory approach, which is beautifully and evocatively reflected in her prose, Vanessa refuses to give up her fight for sight. Throughout the book she insists again and again on her need to see. This stubborn reliance on sight is the book's most important, yet most unsettling message: by revealing just how embedded sight is in most people's sense of their own identity, Vanessa unwittingly reveals the complex reasons why most people are terrified of losing their sight. Anyone who is frustrated by society's refusal to acknowledge the validity of their particular way of seeing will find much to relate to in this enthralling account.<br>
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<i>Patient H69 </i>is available in print and e-book <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/patient-h69-9781472936134/">here</a>. Enter PATIENT at the checkout to receive at 30% discount. It is available from amazon <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Patient-H69-Story-Second-Sight/dp/B06X3S1MZT">here</a> as a kindle or audio book. At my behest, Bloomsbury have provided descriptions of all the images found in the book <a href="https://patienth69.com/the-book/visual-descriptions-of-book-illustrations?iframe=true&theme_preview=true" target="_blank">here</a>.<br>
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Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-87649889734860706352017-03-11T12:11:00.001+00:002017-03-11T12:11:51.402+00:00Audio Description in the Art Gallery 2As part of some scoping work for my new research project on creative and collaborative audio description, I have been experiencing AD in various settings. Last week I went to a high-profile (and expensive) exhibition at an internationally renowned university museum <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/audio-description-in-art-gallery.html" target="_blank">whose AD provision was rather limited</a>. Yesterday I went to a small exhibition at the <a href="http://www.medway.gov.uk/leisurecultureandsport/localhistoryandarchives/museums/guildhallmuseum.aspx" target="_blank">Guildhall Museum</a> in Rochester (Kent) who have adopted a much more inclusive, and impressive, approach.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin0nIyxMB3P9uMQP0wufoSdUK0At8ahSkIgT_4KnhgldChnVatKXO3YRw6-HbYETBj8rm0fuYl3-E2GE8EUK0pRNl9X54ltyrKG_SvZdd67AjWdJ9Xc0qbsoOr1cFU67of4QYD4r-F7g0/s1600/IMG_3157.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin0nIyxMB3P9uMQP0wufoSdUK0At8ahSkIgT_4KnhgldChnVatKXO3YRw6-HbYETBj8rm0fuYl3-E2GE8EUK0pRNl9X54ltyrKG_SvZdd67AjWdJ9Xc0qbsoOr1cFU67of4QYD4r-F7g0/s320/IMG_3157.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<i>This photograph shows a poster advertising 'The Value of Touch'</i></div>
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'The Value of Touch' is an exhibition of work by members of the <a href="https://kabmedwayartgroup.wordpress.com/about/" target="_blank">Kent Association for the Blind Medway Art Group</a> curated and facilitated by artist <a href="http://www.wendydaws.co.uk/" target="_blank">Wendy Daws</a>, whose new touchable art works also feature in the exhibition. Yesterday's tour was particularly remarkable for the layers of interconnected and collaborative audio and tactile experience it revealed and encouraged. At the beginning of the project, in July 2016, the artists were given an audio and tactile tour of objects in the Guildhall Museum's collections by the collections manager Steve Nye. They then worked with Wendy to create tactile art works inspired by the museum's artifacts. Not only was art created in response to tactile and audio experience, it also had tactility embedded within it. This meant that yesterday's audio described tour, delivered by Lonny Evans from <a href="http://vocaleyes.co.uk/" target="_blank">VocalEyes</a>, could easily incorporate a tactile element because all the art works were designed to be touched as well as looked at. In addition, Wendy added her own touchable art works to the show.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ8cQ-mW-_t6FfqdRVAK9fuLyrtArPc2fy8QTSwbnHBEvvT1I9RezkuBm6ztCHoREGoFq2gpiwUAxyEhyphenhyphenAk6UqmOrHsQ4n6WN0w4aQ9-hHRvzVVyZtQKOdYA-GTRb65PXaZzPmkFfgkLo/s1600/IMG_3158+%2528002%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQ8cQ-mW-_t6FfqdRVAK9fuLyrtArPc2fy8QTSwbnHBEvvT1I9RezkuBm6ztCHoREGoFq2gpiwUAxyEhyphenhyphenAk6UqmOrHsQ4n6WN0w4aQ9-hHRvzVVyZtQKOdYA-GTRb65PXaZzPmkFfgkLo/s320/IMG_3158+%2528002%2529.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>This photograph shows Wendy's artistic responses to the artists' work. Lonny's audio description says: "'<span lang="EN-US">Low Relief Tactile Representations' captures in tactile form the key artworks from the exhibition. A significant motif from each of the artists' work has been selected and rendered in 11 separate crystacal plaster plaques moulded from carved clay. The raised plaques are creamy white and abo</span>ut the size of a large side plate. They are embedded in two rows into a purpose built grey table." What Lonny doesn't say is that beneath the artworks is a sign, in print and braille, which says 'Please touch gently'.</i></blockquote>
These artistic responses to the artists' responses to the museum's objects create a third layer of tactile experience which visitors can explore alongside the artworks. Lonny's description adds an audio layer. When experienced together these four elements represent both an artistic response and a tactile-audio translation; a brilliant example of how access can be literally built into art and how art can be inspired by access as well as being mediated through it.<br />
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After describing the general layout of the exhibition spaces, Lonny gave us an audio account of a selection of the artworks on display before letting us touch both the artworks themselves and some of the artifacts which inspired them. Lonny also included quotations from the artists and those artists who were present also spoke about their own works. The result was an immersive, collaborate and inclusive audio and tactile experience which enabled visitors to experience art in a multi-sensory way.<br />
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As well as writing and delivering the AD script, Lonny has agreed to make it available online so that anyone can use it as part of their gallery experience. This means that blind (and sighted!) people can get a sense of the exhibition before, during or after their visit. The museum has also produced large print and braille guides to accompany the exhibition.<br />
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When I asked the Ashmolean why they had not produced large print, braille or audio guides for their Degas to Picasso exhibition, they said that it is generally not worth producing such materials for a temporary exhibition. But yesterday's audio tour at the Guildhall Museum''s temporary exhibition gave 20 blind and partially blind people an unforgettable and immersive experience. It is also now available to anyone who wants it. This exhibition is a model of best practice which other museums and galleries should be encouraged to emulate. This is because access is celebrated here for its creative and collaborative potential. It is positioned at the centre of this exhibition, not added (or more often than not omitted) as a costly and cumbersome afterthought. <br />
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-17254353267571689632017-03-02T16:55:00.002+00:002017-03-02T16:55:21.897+00:00Audio Description in the Art Gallery<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA7eLUrYTYxmxYRx8LGmtdX5WDvxSwUEmKjooBPk7kD-3vraecopkCpbmDjFWTQonvgMcAYQnV-DIqrI_wEghYPMo6SEwtiHr6R7iaYinJ9A6J99IAfm1MOBpfPqExuG7D4oSK-ZkzTUo/s1600/picasso.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA7eLUrYTYxmxYRx8LGmtdX5WDvxSwUEmKjooBPk7kD-3vraecopkCpbmDjFWTQonvgMcAYQnV-DIqrI_wEghYPMo6SEwtiHr6R7iaYinJ9A6J99IAfm1MOBpfPqExuG7D4oSK-ZkzTUo/s640/picasso.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>This image is a screenshot from the Ashmolean website. It is made up of three panels. The left-hand panel gives the title of the exhibition, in the middle is a picture of a mother and child which looks like a Picasso (but in fact isn't), and on the right is a panel with further information. </i></div>
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In the February issue of their <i>Museums Journal</i>, the Museums Association included an article with the somewhat 'no-brainer' title <a href="https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news-analysis/01022017-museums-need-to-do-more-to-welcome-disabled-visitors" target="_blank">'Museums need to do more to welcome disabled visitors'.</a> According to the article, whilst museums are keen to point out that their galleries are accessible to wheelchair riders, and that guide dogs are welcome, they do not always make the actual collections accessible to partially blind visitors. This is particularly true of temporary exhibitions and the Ashmolean Museum's current blockbuster show, <a href="http://www.ashmolean.org/degastopicasso/" target="_blank">'From Degas to Picasso'</a> seemed to be no exception. The show's website reproduces the frustratingly familiar misunderstanding of access evoked in the article. To the Frequently Asked Question: 'Is the exhibition accessible?' they provide the chirpy but misleading response:<br />
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Yes. Access to the exhibition is via lift and the entire exhibition is wheelchair accessible with handheld labels available.</blockquote>
Undeterred, I phoned up to ask about availability of audio description headsets, large-print labels or a Braille catalogue, I was not surprised to be told that none of the above existed. But I was delighted to be offered a 1-to-1 audio described tour of the exhibition from a knowledgeable expert-guide.<br />
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When I got to the museum, my guide Lynne was waiting for me exactly where I was expecting her to be. She introduced herself, led me up to the exhibition and gave me an overview of the history of the collection and its contents before we went into the three-room show. She then provided me with descriptions of a selection of the pictures, coupled with the kind of information that brings art and its history to life. My friends and family have been describing pictures to me for years, but none of them (apart from my Dad) know enough about art history to combine the kind of objective description used by audio describers with an insight into artistic techniques, context and the painting's place in the collection more generally. As Lynne adapted her descriptions to my interest, sight levels and knowledge of nineteenth-century French art, the tour became a collaborative response to the pictures. Indeed, at one point another gallery-goer chipped in with her interpretation of a detail in one of the exhibits.<br />
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The tour had other unexpected consequences. Lynne encouraged me to break the unspoken rule of gallery going and get as close to the paintings as I could. With my nose pressed up against the glass, and her fingers guiding my eyes, I could see globs of paint, brush strokes and chalk marks that I would never have dared to discover otherwise. I also noticed that as we moved from the nineteenth-century realism of David, Ingres and Millais, to the cubist work of Picasso and Braque, Lynne's descriptions reflected the visual difficulty of the pictures. As we together deciphered Albert Gleize's cubist portrait of Stravinsky, for example, our inability to find the language to describe the disjointed shapes on the canvas reflected the picture's own challenge to normative ways of both painting and seeing. I like to think that the cubists' challenge to conventional representation was being echoed in our unconventional approach to the guided tour. Part tour, part audio description, our collaborative exploration of a selection of the exhibition's works felt like a wonderfully immersive way of sharing different ways of seeing and talking about art.<br />
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I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been able to benefit from Lynne's time and expertise. But I am sure there are lots of partially blind people who will never access this art. Some will be put off by the website's failure to mention audio described tours. Those who are persistent enough to find the right number to call (FYI at the Ashmolean, access is handled by the <a href="http://www.ashmolean.org/education/aboutus/access/" target="_blank">education department</a>), may not be free on the same days and times as Lynne. (As is so often the case tours are not usually offered on weekends or in the evening). Or they might be put off by the 1-to-1 format. This is wonderful art that everyone should be able to experience. Surely it can't be that difficult or expensive to record or transcribe Lynne's words and make them available in audio, large-print and braille versions for anyone who wants them.<br />
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<br />Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-2651427377690579312017-01-29T07:16:00.000+00:002017-01-29T20:04:23.025+00:00Crowdfunding Appeal: Please Support Cull by Tanvir BushMaking a crowdfunding pledge is always a bit of a gamble. You are agreeing to back something that you like the sound of, but unless others do the same, there is no guarantee that your support will make a difference. I made my first foray into crowdfunding four years ago when I backed indie documentary 'Best and Most Beautiful Things'. When I received my copy of the film earlier this year I was delighted that my gamble had paid off. You can read more about this wonderful film <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/best-and-most-beautiful-things.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<div>
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I backed 'Best and Most Beautiful Things' because it promised to depict blindness in creative and unsentimental ways. Too many representations of blindness in film and fiction trot out tired stereotypes which do nothing to change the largely negative ways that society sees blind people. If we want these attitudes to change, it is essential that positive images of blindness become more prevalent. This is a crucial means of ending discrimination against disabled people. The new satirical novel <i><a href="https://unbound.com/books/cull" target="_blank">Cull</a> </i>by partially-blind writer and film-maker Tanvir Bush has the potential to do just that. Not only does it feature a partially-blind heroine but it is billed as 'a fabulous, funny, sharp, outrageous satire about the deadly dark side of discrimination'. And it is endorsed by Fay Weldon. What's not to like? In addition, the synopsis sounds very promising indeed:</div>
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Alex has a problem. Categorized as one of the disabled,
dole-scrounging underclass, she is finding it hard to make ends meet. Now, in
her part time placement at the local newspaper, she’s stumbled onto a troubling
link between the disappearance of several homeless people, the new government
Care and Protect Bill and the sinister extension of the Grassybanks residential
home for the disabled, elderly and vulnerable. Can she afford the potential risk
to herself and her wonderful guide dog Chris of further investigation?</blockquote>
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<o:p> And <a href="https://unbound.com/books/cull/excerpt" target="_blank">the excerpt</a> is definitely worth a read. </o:p>Having enjoyed Bush's first novel <i>Witch Girl</i>, I know she can write and I'm convinced that this is a novel that needs to be published. I've made my pledge. Will you? Click <a href="https://unbound.com/books/cull" target="_blank">here</a> to support <i>Cull</i>.</div>
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Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-6105204316381897852017-01-11T12:54:00.001+00:002017-01-12T09:08:24.415+00:00Audio Books and Disability Gain<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The Poisonwood Bible</i><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span> </span>by
Barbara Kingsolver is a wonderful book. And it is a powerful example of the
value added to a book by its audio version. It is the
story of a family - a father, a mother and four<span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span> </span>daughters
- who<span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL" lang="AR-SA"><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span> </span>move from<span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span> </span>America<span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL" lang="AR-SA"><span dir="RTL"></span><span dir="RTL"></span> </span>to the Congo in the early
1960s. The father, a Baptist missionary, wants to bring the word of Jesus to
the people of the village. The women just want to survive. The novel is full of
rich descriptions of the plants, animals, food and inhabitants which the family
encounter in their new home on the edge of the Congolese jungle. Especially
when listened to, it is an immersive and sensual account of place.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The story is told by five alternating voices as the mother
and her daughters take turns to speak directly to the reader. All the women
have distinctive ways of speaking and they all relate to language in
intriguingly different ways. These differences are brilliantly reflected in the
audio as the narrator – listed as Robertson Dean (although I have my doubts
about this: see * below) – uses different intonation and rhythm for each
character. The distinctions made by the audio voice are so strong that when I
skip between sections of the book, I can tell which of the five characters is
speaking without referring back to the chapter heading introducing them.<span dir="RTL" lang="AR-SA"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But here we come to a problem, one which I blithely skipped
over in <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/my-love-affair-with-audio-books.html" target="_blank">my previous post</a> about audio books. What should I call the person, in
this case, (apparently) Robertson Dean, whose voice I hear in my headphones as
I listen to the story? S/he is a reader, but not in the same sense as me, or in
the sense of the notion of 'reader' used by literary critics when discussing a
text's impact. S/he is also a narrator, but again not in the sense that literary
critics use the term: unlike Kingsolver’s five narrative voices, the audio
narrator is external to the story, yet also part of it through the voices s/he
creates and his or her presence in my head. (We might call this collapsing of outside
and inside the audio equivalent of free indirect style). The audio narrator is
also a storyteller, in that s/he tells me the story, but as both Kingsolver and
her five fictional narrators are also all story tellers, we need a way of distinguishing
between them. So what word can I use to describe the work and function of the
audio narrator? From now on, and to avoid the kinds of confusion alluded to
above, I will use the French word <i>conteur
</i>(male) or <i>conteuse </i>(female) – a word
meaning variously teller of tales, oral storyteller, out-loud narrator - to refer
to the person who has recorded the audio version of a book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Back to <i>The Poisonwood
Bible</i>: the text is particularly suited to being listened to because of its
poetry. Adah in particular speaks in rhythmic prose poetry, frequently
reversing lines of text or creating long poetic palindromes. Kingsolver plays too
with the resonances of the three languages which the family encounter. Their
native English becomes increasingly mixed with the French of the Belgian colonizers
and the Kituba or Kikongo spoken by the village’s inhabitants. One of the most
astonishing benefits of listening to a text rather than reading it is the way
its patterns and sounds surround and bewitch you: for days during and after
listening to <i>The Poisonwood Bible </i>I have
had new words, like <i>maniop, kakakaka</i>,
<i>bangala</i> and <i>mongosi</i> scattered through my thoughts and dreams. I cannot write with the poetry of Kingsolver
but I can urge my readers to aurally immerse themselves in this powerfully
evocative world.<span dir="RTL" lang="AR-SA"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As well as being an epic story of the effects of </span>colonization<span style="font-family: inherit;">, the battles for race and gender equality, the dangers of military
rule and the difficulties of democracy, </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">The
Poisonwood Bible </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">is also a powerful celebration of disability through the
story of Adah. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite her final, silent ‘h’, Adah is proud of her
palindromic status (indeed I did not know about her ‘h’ until I read about the
novel on Wikipedia). She calls herself Ada. <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/palindrome-or-left-of-centre.html" target="_blank">Like me</a> Ada is a palindrome, and
like me, she is asymmetrical. She was born ‘crooked’ (she has hemiplegia), she
walks with a limp and she does not speak until adulthood. Indeed, her
palindromic status makes her a poet: she reads front-to-back and back-to-front
and her world is full of a magic that she loses when she is later ‘cured’. Most people judge Ada by her physical
appearance and treat her as a slow and backward child. She is often forgotten
or left behind, most notably on the terrible night of the ant invasion. But her
voice - which only the reader hears for much of the narrative - is full of
wisdom and wit. As an adult, Ada is cured of her limp and begins to walk ‘normally’.
Whilst her family and colleagues are delighted by her new able-bodiedness, Ada
herself feels like she has become a different, and less interesting person. Her
response to her ‘cure’ resonates strongly with my own feelings about disability
gain, exemplified for me by the power of the audio book:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am still Ada but you would hardly know me now without my
slant. I walk without any noticeable limp. Oddly enough, it has taken me years
to accept my new position. I find I no longer have Ada, the mystery of coming
and going. Along with my split body drag I lost my ability to read in the old
way. When I open a book the words sort themselves into narrow minded single
file on the page. The mirror image poems erase themselves half-formed in my
mind. I miss those poems. Sometimes at night in secret I still limp
purposefully around my apartment like Mr Hyde, trying to recover my old ways of
seeing and thinking. Like Jekyll I crave that particular darkness curled up
within me. Sometimes it almost comes. The books on the shelf rise up in solid
lines of singing colour. The world drops out and its hidden shapes snap forward
to meet my eyes. But it never lasts. By morning light the books are all hunched
together again with their spines turned out, fossilized, inanimate. No one else
misses Ada. Not even Mother. She seems thoroughly pleased to see the
crumpled bird she delivered finally straighten out and fly right. ‘But I liked
how I was’, I tell her. ‘Oh, Adah, I loved you too, I never thought less of you,
but I wanted better for you’. Don’t we have a cheerful, simple morality here in
Western civilization. Expect perfection and revile the missed mark. Adah the
poor thing. Hemiplegious, egregious, beseigious. Recently it has been decided,
grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one’s fault. But one
still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed. When Jesus cured those
crippled beggars, didn’t they always get up and dance offstage, jabbing their
canes sideways and waggling their top hats? Hooray! All better now! Hooray! If
you are whole, you will argue, why wouldn’t they rejoice? Don’t the poor
miserable buggers all want to be like me? Not necessarily, no. The arrogance of
the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we’d like to be able to get places
quickly and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up
with the rest of you or get the Verse. We would rather be just like us, and
have that be alright. How can I explain that my two unmatched halves used to
add up to more than one whole? (<i>The
Poisonwood Bible</i> chapter 13)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">* Robertson Dean is credited with the narration of the audio
book but I spent the whole novel convinced I was listening to a female <i>conteuse</i>. Having listened to samples of
Dean’s other work on the audible website, I am struggling to believe that he is
the <i>conteur</i> of Kingsolver’s work. </span><o:p></o:p></div>
Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-77273010730019191482017-01-03T13:00:00.003+00:002017-01-03T13:00:36.981+00:00Best and Most Beautiful Things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7aI7nSOpIYmi9ZjqxoIkXGPhC3CelbXhxgbL2SZAUBcB9RTwE-FwMCxAM93FZXvrYknky70q4B4i_O9QzP4D194AReiB9py6H0jSvNcBW9eYNSldW-zp4d1bDKQzIMSbSnKCOAUhBr8/s1600/225_bambt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7aI7nSOpIYmi9ZjqxoIkXGPhC3CelbXhxgbL2SZAUBcB9RTwE-FwMCxAM93FZXvrYknky70q4B4i_O9QzP4D194AReiB9py6H0jSvNcBW9eYNSldW-zp4d1bDKQzIMSbSnKCOAUhBr8/s1600/225_bambt.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>This image is the cover of the DVD: it is a shot of Michelle's legs waiting at a pedestrian crossing in the dark. Her white cane is also shown. She is wearing bright pink ballet pumps and mismatched knee-high socks.</i></div>
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In 2013 I was contacted about a crowd sourcing project to fund a documentary about a legally blind student graduating from <a href="http://www.perkins.org/" target="_blank">Perkins School for the Blind</a>. I was pleased to make a donation and a few days ago I received my Kickstarter reward: a free download of <a href="http://www.bestandmostbeautifulthings.com/" target="_blank">Best and Most Beautiful Things</a>. The film, which was released to much <a href="http://www.bestandmostbeautifulthings.com/press/" target="_blank">critical acclaim</a>, aired on PBS yesterday and is now available <a href="http://www.bestandmostbeautifulthings.com/buy/" target="_blank">to buy</a> as an iTunes download or a DVD with Audio Description. </div>
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Before I watched the film, I was worried that it would be yet another sentimental, 'triumph over tragedy' story about a blind girl overcoming adversity. But knowing that it won 'Best in Fest' at the <a href="http://www.superfestfilm.com/2016-films/" target="_blank">2016 International Disability Film Festival 'Superfest'</a> reassured me that I was about to watch a creative and critical depiction of blindness.<br />
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'Best and Most Beautiful Things' is indeed a thought-provoking film about blindness. But rather than trying to teach its audience about life with blindness, the film simply shows Michelle going about her daily life. This is a hugely effective way of sharing Michelle's experience without depicting her as victim, object or other. We see her magnifying text on her computer, holding print close to her face and using her white cane. We also see her roller-skating, singing, shopping, getting dressed and skyping. Blindness is part of Michelle's normal. So as we watch the film it becomes part of ours. The film's cinematography helps us share Michelle's way of seeing. Extreme close-ups replicate Michelle's proximity with everything she sees whilst out-of-focus, decentred or jumpy shots echo the world beyond Michelle's field of vision. There are also moments which remind us of the disadvantages and advantages of blindness. I have often experienced Michelle's tearful frustration when fruitlessly searching for a lost object. But on the other hand, her karaoke singing is made more beautiful and more fluent because she is obliged to memorise the lyrics of every song she sings. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaJcf7FNBeLwglcf0PbDQa161BZiVOEjlT9CZ0Jv1EoFJR4VMwGC7QUl_lk99ZUHXeC3TWE7v4uY6tIgRULWw6vx0fZzMn2TL9ZJf1M_WbhysGBfddyZjXk4AGCg9LOsbZzQ7oGWJ103I/s1600/BEST-AND-MOST-BEAUTIFUL-THINGS-Michelle-Smith-shares-her-message-to-Unlearn-Normal-Image-by-Sarah-Ginsburg-650x366.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaJcf7FNBeLwglcf0PbDQa161BZiVOEjlT9CZ0Jv1EoFJR4VMwGC7QUl_lk99ZUHXeC3TWE7v4uY6tIgRULWw6vx0fZzMn2TL9ZJf1M_WbhysGBfddyZjXk4AGCg9LOsbZzQ7oGWJ103I/s320/BEST-AND-MOST-BEAUTIFUL-THINGS-Michelle-Smith-shares-her-message-to-Unlearn-Normal-Image-by-Sarah-Ginsburg-650x366.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>This still from the film shows Michelle colouring in a large home-made poster which says 'Unlearning Normal!' in rainbow letters.</i></div>
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In 'Best and Most Beautiful Things' Michelle urges us to 'unlearn normal'. The film shows Michelle's refusal to conform to any of the stereotypes her parents, teachers and acquaintances might have once associated with blindness. Her provocative re-appropriation of the myth of the infantile blind girl is particularly interesting. She challenges some people's tendency to overprotect or talk down to blind people, particularly blind women, by both her proud love of dolls and her discovery and celebration of submissive BDSM age-play. Michelle's sex-positive, non-binary stance is a crucial part of the film's challenge to normal. As the director Garrett Zevgetis puts it in a <a href="http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/garrett-zevgetis-hacks-normal-best-beautiful-film/" target="_blank">Q and A for PBS</a>:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our collective ideas about “normal” can be downright dangerous and thus must consistently be challenged. #HackNormal: The most dangerous and deep rooted normality might be hegemonic masculinity.</blockquote>
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We all have a tendency to make assumptions about other people based on our own preconceptions. 'Best and Most Beautiful Things' urges us to rethink how we see others. It is a powerful, touching, yet resolutely unsentimental call for a more tolerant, imaginative and creative society where everyone is valued for who they are. <br />
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Watch it.Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7705714898680615192.post-71468374959149202752016-11-11T10:18:00.000+00:002016-11-11T10:18:00.407+00:00My Love Affair with Audio Books2016 has been a dark year for me. I'm not (just) using 'dark' here for its metaphoric (and ocularcentric) meanings of ''sad' and 'gloomy'. I also mean that my two <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/my-cataract-operation-2-what-i-see-now.html" target="_blank">cataract operations</a>, not to mention <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/skiing-blind-again.html" target="_blank">the broken leg</a>, obliged me to spend a lot of time lying in the dark. It is no coincidence that 2016 is also the year that I rediscovered the wonder of audio books. When I was a child, commercially produced audio books were hard to find. I had two: <i>The Railway Children </i>and <i>Black Beauty</i> and I listened to them both so many times that I wore them out. But not before I had learnt them off by heart. When <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/reading-in-detail.html" target="_blank">my reading glasses</a> were perfected, I abandoned audio books in favour of much more readily available print books. Five years ago I discovered <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-my-kindle-changed-my-life.html" target="_blank">kindle </a>which let me read large-print even as my eyes were failing.<br />
<br />
My love affair with audio books began again at <a href="http://blindcreations.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Blind Creations</a> when writer and musician <a href="http://romain-villet.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Romain Villet</a> introduced me to his electronic reader Victor. The <a href="http://store.humanware.com/heu/victor-reader-stream-new-generation.html" target="_blank">Victor Stream</a> is a pocket-sized machine which reads texts in almost any electronic format (except PDF) out loud using a pretty convincing text-to-speech voice. I find it particularly useful for reading long documents quickly: not only can I accelerate the reading speed, I can also skip material, make notes and highlight important passages. Listening to text will never be as quick as reading it, but I am getting closer. I read Jean Giono's <i>Le chant du monde </i>this way in May and it is perhaps for this reason that I noticed the novel's extraordinary non-visual, multisensory, prose, which I discuss <a href="http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/towards-multisensory-aesthetic-jean.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Blind people have listened to stories for as long as blind people have existed. But audio books have only very recently become widely and easily available to the non-blind public.. Libraries now use services like <a href="https://www.overdrive.com/" target="_blank">overdrive</a> to deliver audio content electronically, and companies like <a href="http://www.audible.co.uk/mt/free_trial_special_offer_mt_at?bp_ua&source_code=M2M30DFT1BkSH11201400LJ&tmad=c%26tmcampid%3D52%26tmplaceref%3DENGINE%26tmclickref%3Daudible free" target="_blank">Audible</a> encourage busy people to multi-task by reading as they run, drive or cook. <br />
<br />
I was sceptical about Audible's offering at first. I thought their books were over-priced, especially as the <a href="http://www.rnib.org.uk/books" target="_blank">RNIB's talking book service</a> gives me free access to books read by volunteers. Crucially though, it takes the RNIB a while to provide access to recently published books and they do not always have the books I want when I want them; they also have next to nothing in French. Audible, on the other hand, often has books available at the same time as the print versions are published. This means that I can read the same books as my family and friends; now more than ever I feel like I am part of contemporary literary culture. <br />
<br />
But for me the main advantage of Audible is the way their books sound. Their narrators are professional performers who deliver their texts in compelling and creative ways. They sound like they have thought about how to read the story; they adopt different voices for different characters, they change the tone, speed and volume of their voice to match the prose and they pay attention to dialects, accents and regional contexts. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's wonderful <i>Americanah </i>is an excellent example of the difference a good narrator can make. The novel, which is about a Black woman's experiences in Nigeria and America, is read by Black actress <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjoa_Andoh" target="_blank">Adjoa Andoh</a> and produced by <a href="https://wholestoryaudiobooks.co.uk/" target="_blank">Whole Story Audiobooks</a>. In what might be the audio equivalent of free indirect speech, I immediately felt a powerful connection with the narrative voice through the narrator's voice. In addition, when Adichie's narrator talks about the different accents she encounters in Nigeria, and how a person's voice does or does not reflect their personality or social situation, Andoh's voice cleverly mimics the different accents that her protagonist is describing. Because of its narrator, I am convinced that listening to <i>Americanah </i>was a more immersive, enriching and fulfilling experience than reading it would have been. <br />
<br />
To my great delight, Audible also offers audiobooks in French and I have been devouring Fred Vargas's Commisaire Adamsberg books this year. In the fifth book in the series, <i>Sous les vents de Neptune </i>(<i>Wash this Blood Clean from my Hand</i>), produced by <a href="http://www.audiolib.fr/" target="_blank">Audiolib</a>, Adamsberg and his colleagues travel to Quebec and spend time encountering, deciphering and discussing the impenetrable Quebecois accents and vocabulary of their Canadian colleagues. The narrator, <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Berland" target="_blank">Francois Berland</a> has a lot of fun putting on Quebecois accents and there is no doubt that his different voices improved my experience of reading this novel. <br />
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Audiobooks are a great example of what disability studies would call 'blindness gain': they were first developed for blind people and have now become widely available to everyone. They used to be an assistive technology for a marginalised population; they are now widely and easily available. Non-blind people are now lucky enough to be able to access the wonderful world of audio, a world which was once the closely guarded secret of blind people. Hannah Thompsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02537301344697081335noreply@blogger.com1