Take the Blind Tour! Mainstreaming "Special Needs" Technologies
Notes from an American Travelogue, August, 1997
Share a Smile Becky, Barbie’s friend in a wheelchair, does not fit into the elevator of Barbie’s dreamhouse, the shocking news story read before departure. A Washington state girl, herself in a wheelchair, learned this sad state of affairs while visiting a girlfriend and attempting to negotiate Becky with chair into her friend’s dollhouse. Mattel, it was announced, would redesign future Barbie dreamhouses (actually all relevant ‘doll accessories’) in the continuing movement to make American infrastructure barrier- free, also in miniature.
After sharing smiles myself, I decided to take the cue and pay special (albeit holiday) attention to the technological achievements of those voices or indeed the social groups who clearly had achieved the status of ‘relevance’ in certain design debates and frameworks. [1] Apart from the more obvious design outcomes of the past couple of decades, [2] and apart from the recent celebrated placement of two small wheels at the back of Roosevelt’s chair on the new FDR monument in the nation’s capital, I found a few worthy of reporting. While on the level of holiday anecdote, if framed accordingly the illustrations could point to the somewhat unexpected transformation (for me at least) of ‘technologies for others’ into ‘technologies for all’.
In a Washington DC cafe a group of Gallaudet students converse in sign language, very occasionally sneaking a peak at the television set above the bar. It’s only a pre-season Redskin football game (and the regulars have long since left the field), but there is entertainment or at least diversion to be found in the continuing stream of subtitles, provided by the Department of Education, in collaboration with CNN. The astute waitress informs me that it’s no ‘special needs place’, uttering the term to show offense towards my question whether it were a Gallaudet student haunt, as I nodded upwards in the direction of the TV. Indeed, the titles are on most pub TVs, often no longer with the announcement ‘closed captioned for the hearing impaired’. Among other things, the captions reduce the jarring noise levels.
At Rehobeth Beach, Delaware, just north of the Mason-Dixon line (as the road signs remind you), big-wheeled beach wheelchairs can be rented. The exotic incident by the seaside [3] entailed a granny pushing her ‘non vertically challenged’ granddaughter along the beach at a fairly decent clip. ‘All kinds of folks use those things,’ said the guy with the pouch. There’s no blue handicap sign attached. They’re just big-wheeled beach wheelchairs.
With so many museums offering (self-guided) interactive audio tours, the question arose which one was worth taking, if any. The inside tip given at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is, in fact, the blind tour, offered by a company called Visible Interactive. The blind tour has two advantages over all their other (Apple Newton) tours, I was told by the seller. It describes and interprets all the objects in the museum, and you don’t have to choose your own route. ‘Just listen to the instructions and glide through. It’s informative and extremely soothing.’ He threw in, ‘You know you can choose your own route across the mall, afterwards.’
Ostensibly for wheelchair users, the hearing impaired, the elderly and the visually impaired, these former ‘technologies for others’ were fast becoming what (at least) Dutch product design circles have been championing and attempting to build for a few years now, under the mottos ‘Design for All’ and ‘Access for All’. Unlike the low water bubblers, the wide-berth handicap toilets, the large print telephone number pads, the long building access ramps and the signing at official gatherings (to name a few of the noticeable results of movements initially culminating in the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1991), some of the newer technologies for the variously challenged seem to fit into an emerging late 90s culture without ‘special’ comment or explanation. Just as, generally speaking, certain challenged groups in the U.S. were ‘mainstreamed’, or more dubiously ‘normalised’ (through the closure of institutions, the opening of sheltered workshops and of groups homes and, later, the promotion of self-sufficiency with the aid of on-call staff, and communication and monitoring technologies), so now it seems (more benignly) some of the technological aids themselves are mainstreaming. Instead of observing, with chin in hand, and mindfully framing the examples in terms of ‘unintended usage’ or what have you, I watched the titles, jumped in the chair, and took that blind tour!
Notes
On the social achievement of ‘relevance’, in extension of W. Bijker’s work on ‘relevant social groups’, see Blume, S., “The Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric of a ‘Bionic’ Technology,” Science, Technology & Human Values, 22, 1, Winter, 1997, pp. 31-56.
“Tangible results [of the barrier-free movement] are evident in laws and building codes mandating wheelchair-negotiable buses, curbs, bathrooms, public buildings, and plazas; braille-encoded elevator buttons; public phones with adjustable volume; and so forth.” Sclove, R., Technology and Democracy, Guilford Press, New York, 1995, p. 112.
‘Intoxicating spectacle of movement, constant change and the exotic incident’ were the three features which attracted Monet to the French seaside in the summer, according to a label at the Philadelphia Art Museum.