That All May Participate

Episode Transcript

Nefertiti Matos We are walking through one of my favorite places in the world, which is these tall stacks of Braille books. I love the smell here, I love how quiet it is. 

Adwoa Adusei This is Nefertiti Matos. She’s an Assistive Technology Instructor at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library in Manhattan, and she is also blind.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras We met her back in January 2020, so, before the pandemic, when our producer was able to meet Nefertiti in person and see the stacks filled with books written in Braille.

Nefertiti Matos I just love being surrounded by literacy, knowing that I can at any point reach out or reach up, pull out a book and see it — read what it says. I can’t really do that anywhere else without, you know, my technology reading it out to me or a human being saying, "oh, that says this," or "this says that." To me, what all these books say is independence and personal choice and nothing being filtered through anybody else. It’s just all me.

Adwoa Adusei Nefertiti first came to the Andrew Heiskell Library, which is a branch of New York Public Library, as a patron. And, what Nefertiti is describing here, this physical library of browsable Braille books — it’s a rare thing to behold.

Chancey Fleet In my home state, our library was more of a warehouse situation, where books got mailed out. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s Chancey Fleet. Chancey grew up in Virginia, and, as a blind child, she was a voracious reader of books in Braille.

Chancey Fleet And you actually couldn't browse the Braille books yourself. You had to send a staff member back and they would get it for you. And, when I came to this library as a tourist when I was ten, I had my first experience of actually browsing in the stacks like anyone. And that memory stayed with me for years.

Adwoa Adusei Chancey is now the Assistive Technology Coordinator at NYPL’s Andrew Heiskell Library. Like Nefertiti, Chancey first started working at the library as a volunteer several years ago. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And, when they started volunteering, the Andrew Heiskell Library was underutilized. Not that many patrons were coming in. So, there was a proposal to send NYPL’s Braille books into storage.

Adwoa Adusei As activists, Nefertiti, Chancey, and others pushed back on that proposal. The community sprang into action. Here’s Chancey again.

Chancey Fleet To be honest with you, I had not come to this library in years because all the books are available digitally now. And even though in theory I love browsing the stacks, I hadn't found reasons to come into the library. And so that's part of what drove us to start the tech coaching clinic here, and to start intentionally getting more involved with the library, because it's true, this is a valuable community space, but if we don't treat it like it's valuable, if we don't grow our community and turn this place into a community hub, you know, it's really the same thing that libraries are facing all around the country and all around the world. As resources go digital, we've got to be more ... more than our collection alone.  

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Chancey, Nefertiti and other staff and volunteers at the library created programming for the public. They created book groups, knitting groups, groups to learn Braille, groups for navigating the world as a Spanish-speaking blind person, and a lot more. Some of the most popular classes are the ones that introduce patrons to assistive technologies — which are tools that help a person navigate around their challenges. Assistive tech can be as simple as a pencil grip for someone who uses their hands differently, and as complex as iPhone apps and accessibility tools.

Adwoa Adusei Because of these new classes, Patrons were engaging more than ever before with the library. The Braille stacks were saved, and people noticed a big change in their library. Here’s Sharlene Kraft

Sharlene Kraft Back then, it was a storage place, primarily. It stored books, Braille and talking books, and people didn't visit very much. They ordered by phone. So you see, it's come a long way.

Ramón Plaza When I first joined the program, it was records. I was getting these big, heavy records. Then came the tapes and the cassettes came later.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That last voice you heard is Ramón Plaza, another regular at the Heiskell Library who started coming in 1971. He agreed that the library has changed a lot in recent years. He’s learning to type on a typing machine for blind and visually impaired learners, and Sharlene says that she’s learned how to use her iPhone and the Braille M E, a refreshable, portable Braille reader.

Sharlene Kraft Because of the different things I have learned, my life is much different. It's much broader. I can remember a time when I would read about what other libraries were doing and I would say, but we never do anything like that. But, now I think we're pretty competitive. 

Adwoa Adusei That idea that Sharlene just mentioned, you know, that libraries should have programs and materials equally available for people of all backgrounds and abilities, a broader term for that is inclusion.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And maybe you’ve heard it referred to in the context of what we call DEI — Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — something that organizations and individuals have been talking more about recently, as our communities reckon with racism, bias, and inequality in all its forms.

Adwoa Adusei We’ve talked about diversity initiatives in regard to representation of different ethnicities and cultures, equity issues in access to library services for people who are incarcerated or adult learners, and today we’re going to talk about at that last term: Inclusion.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Inclusion can mean so many things. It can mean saving Braille books from storage, and it can making our virtual classes and library services available to kids and adults with learning disabilities. We’re going to cover it all. I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras.

Adwoa Adusei And I’m Adwoa Adusei. You’re listening to Borrowed: Stories that start at the library.

[Music]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras We’re returning to the Andrew Heiskell Library, where, back in January 2020, Chancey and Nefertiti were showing our producer a really cool new program.

Nefertiti Matos So right now, I'm using a screen reader to access my file, my file being a beautiful code of what we call a signature guide.

[Sound of screen reader talking]

Chancey Fleet All right, showtime.

[Sound of printer running]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras This is the sound of a 3D printer starting up

Chancey Fleet Do you see the filament on the right hand side on the spool?

Virginia Marshall Oh, yes, I do. 

Chancey Fleet That's how it starts, and it's getting heated up to a toasty 230 Celsius. So, don't touch.

[Laughter]

Adwoa Adusei In 2017, Chancey launched a new program to help people with low or no vision engage with the visual and spatial world. The idea for it came when a patron called the library for help.

Chancey Fleet And I knew that this person was very well connected. They were CEO of a major blindness organization, had a corner office, had a staff, and they were calling me to ask me where they could get a touchable map of the five boroughs because they were moving to New York and they needed to know how the boroughs related. And it really struck me in that moment: This is one of the most privileged people who is blind, that I know of, and they don't know how to solve what to any sighted person would be just like a quick Google search. Something is wrong. And I started to think more and more about it. And, you know, we have the technical means for blind people to experience images. They're called tactile graphics, which just means raised line graphics. The problem is not technical. The problem is … it's not very easy for most people to afford, own and operate this equipment. And so people don't go from saying, "I want to see something" to putting it in a format that they can use.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras So, Chancey applied for a grant from NYPL and was able to purchase a 3D printer for the library. 

Adwoa Adusei The library also received a Braille and tactile graphics embosser from the New York State Commission for the Blind, and Chancey began teaching patrons how to use that machine, too. She pulled out a folder full of raised line graphics, created with the tactile graphics embosser, and used her fingers to read each visual image. You can hear the sound of the 3D printer humming in the background.

Chancey Fleet So this is a water cycle. We have a little sun up in the right hand corner and some clouds and some rain and some trees and going down to the roots and then coming back up. That one is just a little holiday card from when we did holiday cards for Valentine's Day. It's just like an embossed heart that people could write their own Braille messages inside. That's the Hebrew alphabet. That is a graph. That function is Y equals X plus two. That's the five borough map, the original request that started this whole thing! [Laughter]

Adwoa Adusei What’s so important about these two machines, the 3D printer and the tactile graphics embosser, is that both blind and sighted people can program it. 

Chancey Fleet We teach the fundamentals of designing something that is legible, meaningful and beautiful when encountered in the tactile way. And we made sure that all the software and hardware that we have, to the maximum extent available on the market, is operable by people who are blind and sighted. So blind people come in here, sighted family members, blind and sighted educators, museum and culture workers, and they can do anything that they want. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Nefertiti showed our producer a signature guide that she’d made with the 3D printer. A signature guide is something blind people use to help them sign documents in the right place. Basically, it’s a plastic rectangle with a window cut out in the middle.

Adwoa Adusei Nefertiti used code to design her signature guide. And coding, for anyone who has tried it, requires a lot of math.

Nefertiti Matos I'm excited about it, because it's like, I created this! With a lot of help. But, you know, I'm doing this and it makes me feel like I'm not that bad at math, or not as bad as I thought. I thought I was one of these people that could not learn, and I'm learning.

Chancey Fleet Many of us have had very similar experiences confronting, sort of, the stark realities of how much math we we missed. And that becomes apparent pretty quickly if you're trying to do 3D design with code. But this is why the project exists, because I think, you know, I can't speak for you Nefertiti, but for me, I think the reason why I thought I was disinterested in math is that I was never given anything tangible to experience. I wasn't given many images, and I'm just not someone that learns from, like pages and pages of words, a spatial concept. And I want to make sure that if someone needs a graph or, um, geometry diagrams or whatever it is, that they know they have a chance to learn in a way that works well for them.

Adwoa Adusei Chancey and Nefertiti are library workers, which means they are committed to expanding literacy for everyone. For these two library workers, though, literacy doesn’t just mean reading books. It means having the knowledge and the tools to be engaged and independent in the modern world. 

Chancey Fleet I wanted to do for graphics literacy and spatial thinking what we already do for literacy. The National Library Service that we're part of, the motto is "That All May Read." And, like, I want to see that all may read maps and graphics.

[Music]

Krissa Corbett Cavouras This is a very simple idea, that people of all abilities should be given multiple ways to engage and learn. It’s something that Carrie Banks, here at Brooklyn Public Library, thinks about all the time.

Carrie Banks Inclusive Services is really simple. We make library service available to children and teens with disabilities. So that means that they have the same access to the library that peers without disabilities have.

Adwoa Adusei Carrie Banks is a supervising librarian at Brooklyn Public Library’s Inclusive Services department. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras A major problem with inclusion right now is that so many things have moved online. The biggest thing for kids, of course, is that their public school went entirely online last year. 

Carrie Banks Being an exceptional parent or a parent of a child with disabilities can be very isolating. And it's, well, it's doubly isolating now, during the pandemic. Parents come to us, parents, caregivers, grandparents, foster parents come to us because they don't know where else to go. We know that there are about 26,000 students who have just never shown up to class since school has gone virtual. They're just not there. And I suspect that many of them are students with disabilities who are already struggling. Families of children with disabilities tend to be poorer than the average and have less access to things like reliable Wi-Fi and devices, so that's been a real problem. But then sometimes there's just the format itself. So, for some kids whose disabilities impact their way that they interact with the world and socialize with the world, a screen is not a person, and it's very difficult for them to make that connection between the person that's on the screen and a person in real life. So, that's a real problem, a real barrier for a lot of our lot of our kids, especially those on the autism spectrum.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And just a note here that while virtual school has been challenging for most students, there are a small number of kids for whom remote learning has been positive. For kids who have social anxiety or who were too distracted when in the physical school building, learning from home can be a benefit. 

Adwoa Adusei Carrie described one family she helped during the pandemic. The family had a device, but the child hadn’t been showing up to virtual school all year. The mother was on the verge of being charged with educational neglect. But, as Carrie and her team learned, there were multiple barriers to access for this family, barriers that the city didn’t know about.

Carrie Banks I found out that the reason her child had not been online was because she couldn't read or write, and neither could the child. So, they had no way to understand the instructions that they were given or to navigate the menus on the device. So, that was the barrier. So, on the library side, we were able to connect her with our literacy services, and on the educational advocacy side, Ruth DiRoma from IncludeNYC was able to help her get the support that she needed to actually get online.

Adwoa Adusei Carrie just mentioned IncludeNYC, which is a partner organization that provides training and information for young people with disabilities in the city.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Adwoa, I think one lesson from these ideas about inclusion is that we need to be constantly thinking about access. How are our patrons connecting with us? What adjustments do they need to be able to easily attend programs and use materials?

Adwoa Adusei That kind of thinking is so important, particularly in a time of virtual classes and programs. Carrie did have some advice for teachers and others who are running online events to make the content more accessible to kids with disabilities.

Carrie Banks When we're presenting information, we do it in a variety of ways. We're going to present it verbally, like I'm doing now, but we're also going to have some pictures. We're going to use some music to get the ideas across and some movement, things like that. We structure them so that they are sensory friendly, we include picture schedules or an agenda at the beginning, we follow the agenda.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Following an agenda can help kids know what to expect. It helps kids on the autism spectrum in particular regulate themselves, so that they're not suprised by what happens during a program. Carrie also suggested asking more questions of kids during a virtual programs to keep them engaged.

Adwoa Adusei Right, and these are adjustments that help not only kids with disabilities. They can also be helpful for everyone. When we build ideas about inclusion into everything we do, it’s called universal design. Carrie talked a bit about that, too.

Carrie Banks The clearest example of how universal design makes things accessible for everyone is curb cuts and sidewalks. Curb cuts exist because the Americans with Disabilities Rights says that people who use wheelchairs have the right to go from the sidewalk to the street and the street to the sidewalk. And that's really, really important, but it's not people who use wheelchairs who use curb cuts the most. In New York City, it's people with our shopping carts, right, to do our shopping. It's people pushing strollers. Sometimes it's skateboarders. That thing, that curb cut that was designed for people with disabilities has provided access for a much broader range of people. And the same is true in our programs. Something that works well for someone with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, incorporating a lot of movement in the programs, for example, is also something that works well for younger children, right, they need to move more, too.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Universal design and these ideas about inclusion are interventions that help everyone. Carrie mentioned that while her programs are designed for children with disabilities in mind, it’s for kids of all abilities. It’s about leveling that playing field, so that we can have the same access to experiences and education.

Adwoa Adusei And, access is something we need to be thinking about now more than ever. With limited ways for people to engage with the world and socialize during the pandemic, we need to make sure that all are included in our programs and services.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s right. And, over at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, the work has not stopped during the last year. Staff are continuing to run programming virtually. Things like Braille study groups, tactile drawing classes, and info sessions about how to use Zoom with screen readers, so people who are blind can log on to virtual programming. And, they’re still mailing Braille and talking books to your home. We’ll put links to all of those resources on our website.

[Music]

Adwoa Adusei It wouldn’t be a Borrowed episode without books! Librarian Leigh Hurwitz gathered a list of inclusive books.

Leigh Hurwitz My name is Leigh Hurwitz and I'm coordinator of school outreach services. Marginalized communities are often still exclusive spaces that mirror the inequities and oppressive tendencies of the larger culture. So, for example, they often center white people, and often white men. And so these are books that center BIPOC and Queer people from within the disability community and they're also authored by them. So the first one is Disability Visibility: Fiirst-person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, edited by Alice Wong. Alice Wong is a disabled activist, media-maker and research consultant, and she co-founded the disability-visibility project, which partners with Story Corps to record oral histories. And, they're all available to listen to for free online. And Wong also co-hosts the Disability Visibility podcast. So, this book grew out of all of that work, and it's very much about creating community and creating a space within this book. Some of the stories include "The Erasure of Indigenous People and Chronic Illness" by Jen Deerinwater and another one is "The Isolation of Being Deaf in Prison" by Jeremy Woody.

So the next one is A Quick and Easy Guide to Sex and Disability by A. Andrews. Andrews is a Queer and disabled cartoonist and this book is part of the "Quick and Easy Guide" series put out by Limerence Press. Just like Carrie talked about in this episode, about universal design, this book can really apply to everyone and every body, but it specifically covers basics about disability sexuality, it debunks myths about disabled bodies in general, and it's also a practical guide that has tips.

The last one is called The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disability, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me by Keah Brown. This is an essay collection by Brown. She's a Black disabled actor and writer, and she also calls herself a bi-icon. And she created the hashtag #DisabledAndCute. The title of this book comes from the fact that Keah is an identical twin, and growing up, friends would often call her twin "the pretty one." She is not disabled. These essays are really funny and really personal, but they all touch on the fact that there's a nuance in disability and being disabled can be joyful as well as aggravating. Brown is an advocate for disability pride. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras You can find all those titles and then check out the rest of those inclusive book recommendations at our website: BKLYN Library [dot] org [slash] podcasts. 

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is produced by Virginia Marshall and written by Virginia Marshall and me, with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, Meryl Friedman, and Robin Lester Kenton. Our music composer is Billy Libby.  

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, Krissa Corbett Cavouras, and Adwoa Adusei. In the interest of inclusivity, we want to remind you that there is a written version of this episode — and all our episodes — on our website, if you or someone you know has trouble hearing or prefers to read, you can do that with these Borrowed episodes. And, you can translate that transcript, and our entire website into nineteen other languages. Try it out at BKLYN Library dot org slash podcasts. 

Adwoa Adusei Beta listeners on this episode included Melissa Morrone, Karelisa Kimmel, Katya Schapiro, and LaCresha Neal. This is the last episode of season three, and we just wanted to thank you for sticking with us! 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras But we won’t be gone for long! keep checking your podcasts feeds this summer. We’re planning a fantastic mini-series about the overlooked communities that built Brooklyn and made it into the amazing place it is today.

Adwoa Adusei Until then, take care.