Discovering Accessibility 🌳 : a Journey into Disability Culture Activism with Moira Williams.

We are so excited to announce the addition of a wonderful new column to our newsletter, focused on Disability Culture Activism led by our Access Doula Moira Williams. As part of our commitment to accessibility, Moira will be providing us with resources, insights, and stories that uplift our understanding of the interconnections between disability justice, crip celebratory resistance and environmental justice.

This week, Moira kicks off the column with an insightful video on Image Descriptions, showcasing the importance of accessible media. In this video, Moira talks about the cultural practice of Image Description as a form of access magic. demonstrates how to do an Image Description by describing their appearance and shares tips for creating effective descriptions.

Video Image Description: A light colored Indigenous person, moira, enters the screen and sits down in front of a white ground with black noodles that seem to wave and roll. moira has long, dark hair. They are wearing a burgundy jacket with a black t-shirt underneath. moira continues to sit but moves around a little while sitting. They begin to talk about describing your image out loud as an everyday cultural practice of access magic for Blind and Low Sighted people.

Transcript: This takes 3 minutes to read.

Hihi everybody! my name is moira. I’m a disabled indigenous artist and disability cultural activist. I’m honored to be working with every body at Culture Push where we are bringing disability culture and accessibility into Culture Push’s everyday culture.

One way you can bring accessibility with you is by describing your image out loud. This is also called an Image Description.

Image Descriptions can be robust, succinct, poetic. There isn’t a right or wrong way to describe your image. More importantly, Image Descriptions are an essential part of accessibility. Without them, visual content is completely unavailable to Blind and low sighted people.

I’m going to describe myself for you. I like to start with my hair then move down to describe my skin color, eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips, the shape of my face, then my clothes. If I’m online, like I am now, I will describe my background too. I also like to use simple language and introduce myself even if I’ve introduced myself earlier. This helps to connect my Image Description to my name. I also like to speak slowly, to support ASL Interpreters, Real Time Captioning and people who have delays in how they receive information, like I do.

So here we go! Hihi again my name is moira, I’m a disabled Indigenous person. My long dark brown hair has red highlights. It’s in a high ponytail today, and my long bangs are swept to the right side of my face. I have light, light bronze colored skin. My eyebrows are black. They curve above my eyes and point to my eye crinkles. My eyes are a dark, dark blue almost black color. They are slightly hooded. I have high rounded cheekbones and a long thin-ish nose with a bump at the top of it. My lips are medium thick and my smile is a toothy one. My face is long and ends with a square jaw line. I’m wearing a burgundy long sleeved jacket. The jacket has a short collar. The collar and cuffs are white with burgundy stripes. Under my jacket, I’m wearing a black t-shirt with a slightly high neckline. Behind me is my Access Doula virtual background. It’s covered with long black noodles waving horizontally across a white ground.

So that’s my Image Description for you. I’ve learned and I keep learning how to do my Image Description outloud from writing out scripts, from practice and failure. Much of my learning is from inspiration, led by disabled ancestors from the past and new ancestors beaming into our futures. Many disabled people and communities are doing important and creative Image Description work and have been since disabled people have been here, which is forever! Some disabled communities and people help one another write Image Descriptions. A few of the many disabled people who inspire me are; the disability and BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color) group Disabled and Here, Alex Chen, Rebirth Garments, Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan, Alex Haggard, Georgina Kleege, Carmen Papalia, and Andy Slater. Each is part of a large and robust ecology of creative disabled people making access magic. Links to their generous works are below this video.

So, I invite you to brew up some access magic and take it with you by practicing and sharing your Image Description outloud.

If you ever want to get in touch with me, you can reach me at Culture Push.

Thanks for sharing your time with me! Bye!

Links to disabled creatives mentioned

Image Description: A female presenting person ~ moira ~ sits in an electric vibration of scribbled neon green lines and fuzzy medium to dark green dots and splotches. Behind their head, at the top of the image, and at a slight upward angle, are bold black letters saying: Sososo up for hanging! moira is a disabled indigenous person with shiny light colored skin. They are sitting in a 3-quarter pose from the shoulders up. moira’s long, dark hair has purple-ish red streaks. It falls forward over their shoulders and is tucked behind one ear. Their bangs are fluffed up and away from their forehead. They have a long face with high rounded cheeks. Their long nose slightly flares out. moira has black eyebrows rounding over their somewhat hooded almond shaped dark blue eyes. Their eyes are accented with laugh crinkles and black eyeliner. moira is giving us a soft toothy grin. They are wearing a bright red crew neck t-shirt that is short sleeved with bright blue stripes at the shoulder. The top edge of a matching bright blue long glove can be seen on moira’s arm closest to us. 

moira (they/them), is a disabled Indigenous artist, cross-disability* cultural activist and access doula; weaving disability justice together with crip** celebratory resistance*** and environmental justice. moira believes in access as art and “access intimacy”**** as an attitude beyond the Americans with Disabilities Act. Their often co-creative work leads with disability, asserting that deep-rooted cultural changes must be made in the arts and environmental justice to become accessible. One part of affecting change is by placing disabled artists and activists in positions of influence to shape change from within.

moira’s on-going work with water focuses on “access intimacy” and water intimacy as ways forward to accessible NYC waterfronts. In 2021, as part of Works On Water’s Tending the Edge, moira engaged NYC’s disability communities with NYC’s Department of City Planning newest Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, which led to extended comment deadlines to support comments from NYC’s disability communities, and an online and in-person Disability Cabaret on an accessible boat.

They recently received a Santa Fe Arts Institute REVOLUTION, Blue Mountain Center Harriet Barlow Residency, Disability + DANCE NYC Social Justice Fellowships, a U.S. Artists Disability Futures Fund and Laundromat Project Abundance grants. moira’s work has been at CUE Art Foundation, Common Field, Landscape Research UK, ARos Museum Denmark, and MoMA PS1 to name a few. They co-curated TALK BACK at Flux Factory with Lexy Ho-Tai; the first NYC exhibition and 3 day convening centering intersectional, intergenerational, cross-disability artists and activists, cited in The New York Times. moira is currently a REMOTE ACCESS Party Collective member and a Leonardo Arts and Science Crip Tech Incubator Fellow with the MAD RAD Disability Lab at Berkeley University, California working on an accessible boat.

moira lives on ancestral Lenape lands colonial known as New York.

**cross-disability

- a 1970’s term centering inclusivity - we all work together in solidarity regardless of what our individual disabilities may be. 

I acknowledge that the word inclusivity/inclusion and words like it have been repeatedly rehearsed and performed throughout the world but not fully digested. A lack of empathy and lived experience prevents digestion, understanding and caring. Causing our experiences to be reduced to policies centering ideas of ‘normality’ based on cis- and white-centric beliefs that are not flexible and regularly made without us. 

Cross-disability also refers to disabled people who have more than one disability.

***celebratory crip resistance

- Joy is a propulsive force. Regimes of power understand that anything that gathers and channels energy threatens the rigid control of a population. Music, dance, art, eroticism, all creative expression, sparks and creates momentum. Joy is a form of resistance because it’s an energy, an “energy for change,” as Audre Lorde declares. It counters and contrasts with the rigidity and control of oppressive structures in a non-violent way. Audre Lorde intentionally calls for joy as resistance in her 1978 essay, The Uses of the Erotic, “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” - moira williams

****crip

- short for cripple. A term often and intentionally used in Disability Justice to reclaim the word cripple. Please only use crip if given permission to do so. Crip is not a term all disabled people embrace. 

*****“access intimacy”

- coined by disability scholar and activist Mia Mingus, is “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs.