Access

Rather than a checklist, Access is a way of moving through the world that centers the lived experiences of disability and prioritizes inclusion, agency, and liberation.

Access Approach

Our approach to Access in the Reco(r)ding CripTech archive draws from the access experiments in the artists’ works, which embrace the complexity of meanings lost and gained through translation and interpretation. Our access experiments are playful, interactive, and a vehicle for free exploration of the artifacts contained within the archive.

For example, the text adventure game serves as an accessible alternative to the Matterport, providing opportunities for agency, choice, and hidden knowledge to assistive technology users. The idea emerged from a conversation Elizabeth had with Andy — about his work Unseen Sound, which invites the user/player/audience to navigate an unseen map with different sonic “rooms.” An avid tabletop roleplaying game enthusiast like Elizabeth, Andy shared that he had originally drawn a “dungeon map” for the design of Unseen Sound, which led to the idea that blind & low vision users should be able to similarly explore the archive like fantasy heroes.

We encourage you to approach the archive with playful curiosity, discovering new insights about the creative process of the artists and other access experiments.

If you have any feedback or encounter any obstacles, we would appreciate hearing from you at a2ru-editorgw@umich.edu.

Access Implemented

Access is the design process of this archive, not an afterthought. How can a digital archive serve users with a wide range of access needs? This question guided key choices in how the archive was built. Our intention throughout was for users to be able to tailor the experience to their own ways of reading, watching, and listening.

This archive was developed with Wax, a minimal computing project for producing digital exhibitions with an emphasis on longevity, low cost, and flexibility. Wax sites are prepared as Jekyll web applications. The site is currently hosted on GitHub Pages. Under the hood, it’s a Jekyll repository containing Markdown files for content; templates for HTML layout; CSS and JavaScript; and media files including videos, images, and PDFs that document the artists’ experiences in the Leonardo CripTech Incubator.

We chose Wax (and, in turn, Jekyll and GitHub Pages) because it allowed us fully customize the interface: not only to ensure WCAG compliance and screen reader compatibility, but to experiment with how access-forward web experiments could be delivered (see below).

The site is typeset in Atkinson Hyperlegible, a free font from the Braille Institute designed to focus “on letterform distinction to increase character recognition, ultimately improving readability,” particularly for low vision readers.

For audio and video playback, the site uses AblePlayer, “a fully accessible cross-browser HTML5 media player.” AblePlayer supports accessibility features such as video chaptering and automatic pausing for visual description.

For image and document viewing, we use Clover IIIF, a set of UI components for the International Image Interoperability Framework built accessibility support. Concretely, this means images and documents can be panned, zoomed, and paged through entirely from the keyboard, and audiovisual materials play in standard HTML elements that assistive technologies already understand.

We use Tabulator to allow exploration of the collection data, with downloadable CSVs and JSON manifests of collection metadata. Of the approaches to data tables we tested, it was the most screen reader friendly.

For AblePlayer, Clover IIIF, and Tabulator, we have made small changes to improve access.

Access Settings

The text size, contrast, and motion controls in the utility bar at the top of every page save your choices under a single key in your browser’s localStorage, scoped to this site.

No cookies are set, nothing is transmitted to a server, and nothing is used for tracking. Clearing your browser’s site data for this domain, or using a different browser or device, clears these settings like any other locally-stored preference.

Access Experiments

For the most part, the making of Recording CripTech involved the collection, organization, and meaningful display of artifacts. Conveniently, the CripTech artists work in digital formats already, so many of their artifacts are media files—image, video, and sound—seemingly ready-made for a digital archive. Yet, we found in a few instances that simply displaying these files fell short of our accessibility goals. This led to our access experiments.

There are five access experiments included in the Reco(r)ding CripTech archive. Access experiments are attempts to create accessible experiences that go beyond approximating or representing an artifact; the access experiments reimagine that artifact anew for an internet archive. The access experiments were sparked by instances in which processes of approximation or representation fell short, and are the result of creative collaboration among the Reco(r)ding CripTech team and the artists themselves. The access experiments are meant to be playful, interactive, and a vehicle for free exploration.

We want to also point out that the access experiments are additive and creative and unique to the archive; they were not part of the artists’ original processes or the E.A.A.T. exhibition. Instead, they were sparked by the demands and realities of online access. Some of the artists also made forays into such access experiments, although they may not have characterized them as such. For example, Josephine Sales embedded information in the alt-text for their images that goes beyond visual description, into the realm of explanation or interpretation. This type of information typically goes into an image’s caption, where everyone will see it. Sales intentionally privileged screenreader users; they get a bit of extra insight that sighted users won’t routinely encounter.

3D Matterport tour as text adventure game (inspired by Andy Slater).

Recording CripTech features a navigable, three-dimensional, digital tour of the E.A.A.T. exhibit at the Beall Center that allows sighted users to get a feel for that gallery experience. Built on Matterport technology, the tour features “pop-up” information along the way: the ability to click on a marker and read more about the marked item. As such, the Matterport tour can serve as a helpful entry point into the archive, orienting the user to the exhibit that contained all the artists’ work; in fact, it’s the first link that appears under “Where to Start” on the archive home page. However, Matterport is not screen-reader or keyboard compatible.

Our access experiment here is a text-adventure version of the Matterport gallery tour. A text-adventure is a video game whose entire interface is text-only; the user navigates it by typing responses to prompts. The idea emerged from a conversation between archive team member Elizabeth McLain and artist Andy Slater about his work Unseen Sound, which invites the user/player/audience to navigate an unseen map with different sonic “rooms.” An avid tabletop roleplaying game enthusiast like Elizabeth, Andy shared that he had originally drawn a “dungeon map” for the design of Unseen Sound. E.A.A.T. also had different rooms: what if it had a dungeon map? What if the Matterport tour could be navigated like a game? Blind and low vision users could explore the exhibit using a text-only interface; even more, they could do it like fantasy heroes, allowing for agency and open-ended exploration as opposed to a more traditional linear text alternative where the paths are predetermined.

We reimagined the Matterport’s 3D spatial map, transforming navigation into a gamified text adventure format. This seemingly outdated game format has the potential to effectively and intuitively represent 3D spaces.

Olivia Ting’s flowchart.

The “Lip Reading” flowchart was a large poster mounted on the wall, displayed as part of Ting’s work Song Without Words at the E.A.A.T. exhibit. Tongue in cheek, the flowchart takes viewers through Ting’s process of understanding and communicating. The flowchart is an interactive visual by nature, prompting users to make choices based on existing information, past actions, and feedback as they move through it.

For blind and low-vision users, familiar online accessibility methods such as general audio description, alternative text, or PDF tagging do not do the poster’s interactive nature justice. To bring the flowchart from the in-person E.A.A.T. experience into an interactive online format, we created an interactive HTML version, where blind/low-vision users can use screen readers to navigate each step of the flowchart, simulating the experience that sighted users have with the original.

Josephine Sales’s Total Running Time Site

At the Beall Center, Total Running Time — artist Josephine Sales’ four-part installation — unfolded as interrelated works exploring temporalities of care, abstracting the halted rhythms of the day and the strictly controlled telecommunications of incarcerated people. Day for Night, an expanded cinema work, illuminated the room with two clocks made of prepared 5K kelvin circadian optic light panels, the kind generically used to mimic sunshine; Pulses is a fifteen-minute telephone call through the prison telecommunication system, the maximum length permitted for calls between an incarcerated person and the free world. These works offered an experience made of light, sound, and duration. Conventional documentation — installation photos, a video walkthrough — could only represent that experience, not convey it. And translating the works individually into online formats wouldn’t give access to the ideas: in the gallery, the four pieces combined and spoke to one another. How could they do that on the web?

Our access experiment here is the Total Running Time site, an auxiliary exhibition platform and digital sourcebook developed with Sales. What began as a conversation about documentation — expected to be more images and materials — became something more coherent: a concept sketch Sales shared, “KEEP IN TOUCH: A SITE OF COROLLARY QUERRIES,” grew over weeks and months into a form of web art in its own right, one that contextualizes the installation and extends their existing access practice. The site is constructed as a series of panels: a user can begin with media like Pulses and move through the journal entries, readings, and resources that grounded the work’s critical engagement with carceral and disability justice — the work revealing itself. Day for Night is translated as a chromaclock keyed to the time zone in which a user visits, slowly fading and color-cycling over the course of an hour as the panels did within the gallery, with playful elements for screen reader users, who are told: “The time is now #F5B347.” Pulses (stems) makes a set of sound materials from the sonic piece available as isolated audio players — a mechanical ventilator, creaky braces, dial tones, phone operators, static fuzz, metronome patterns, a prison telecommunication disclosure announcement, vocal elocution exercises, a sine wave, an a cappella “Unchained Melody,” and an AI failing to define “care.” Anyone, anywhere, can now encounter the durational experience — while the site itself, on loan and available only while a host institution agrees to its terms, remains an experiment in the extraction of time.