Over the weekend, I traveled to Austin to participate in South by Southwest for the first time. The airports were packed, the Uber fares were surging, and even though I trotted up to the Austin Convention Center on Friday dressed only in jeans and a casual long-sleeve shirt, I fit right in. (Insider tip: it seems like you can wear whatever you want, really. Everyone does.)
I went straight to see Meghan Markle talk with Katie Couric and Brooke Shields for International Women’s Day, an event I’m sure I only managed to zip into because of the accessibility-badgeholder entrance and the row of seats up front near the interpreters. (#Deafgain!) The room was packed. There were more cameras there than I’ve seen in a long time, both professional photographers and regular old people with their smartphones. The discussion, about women’s representation in media, was punctuated throughout by people sneaking up front to grab photos of Meghan.
Later that first night, I met up with an old friend of mine who made the trip from Dallas to come watch on Saturday, and we went to grab BBQ brisket sandwiches and mac and cheese at a delicious local spot. (Recommended by another old friend I saw the last time I was in Austin, who has since fled the tech bros in his native city — shout-out!)
But this post isn’t all about frolicking in Austin eating tacos and wondering where Trevor Noah really was (I gather he was around somewhere). I was invited to SXSW to participate on a panel about captioning and accessibility. Here are a few take-aways from the weekend:
1) Accessibility sessions were everywhere
Even though this was my first time at SXSW and I have no baseline to compare, it was great to see so many accessibility-related panels over the weekend. I went to see panels on accessibility in tech and various forms of online media, featuring people doing fabulous work for disability representation, such as Keely Cat-Wells from Making Space.
My own session was with Zohar Dayan from Vimeo and Fernando Trueba from the captioning company Rev, who both gave valuable insights about audience engagement with online videos/media over the last decade or so. I’d already noticed several of the trends they pointed out, like how online captioning spiked once social media companies introduced video-based news feeds, and it was helpful to gain more context. Also, Amanda Morris from The Washington Post did a seamless and energetic job moderating — so nice to meet in person after admiring her work from afar for a few years!
I traveled to the conference knowing that many of the comments I would make at this panel — from “nothing about us without us” to various reasons captioning is important — are things that have been said by deaf and disabled people for years and years now. They’re things I have been saying for years and years now! There’s a certain form of exhaustion I always feel before going and making such remarks again. (I also had another “meh” experience on the way to the conference, when I boarded my Delta flight and found that for some reason none of the films onboard seemed to be captioned. Really?! I wrote complaint letters about this exact thing in high school!)
But the audience at the session was large, hearing folks were clearly there from a variety of tech and social impact and marketing/advertising companies, and some of them came up afterwards to ask me thoughtful questions about how to make various spaces and projects more accessible. I left the session knowing that we’ll have to keep the conversation going — and, as conversations go, this was a good one. I appreciate the folks who put the session together and planned for it to go so smoothly!
The video of the panel has since been posted on YouTube.
2) AI is a real source of buzz
AI captioning has become more and more prevalent in the last few years, and I use it all the time for video chatting with non-signing hearing people, as well as for accessing online content. (It’s still not a sweeping or “universal” solution for access, and it never will be; I wrote this piece last year about this stuff.)
At SXSW, as you would expect, I found a lot of other sessions about AI in… pretty much everything, from healthcare to design to atomic energy. The huge “creative industries” expo room was filled with all sorts of AI applications. (And robots.)
Jury’s still out on this techno-optimistic energy, and I still find robots a little uncanny, but we will see where this all goes!
3) Access + deaf and disability community can make events like this great
Through the deaf/disability internet (a wonderful place), I connected with another deaf SXSW presenter and she invited me to hop into an Airbnb with her hearing colleague. We all had a fun time hanging out, and we also met several other DHH and disabled folks over the weekend. A DEIA happy hour on Saturday night — which provided ASL interpreters, still rare for a networking event — was one highlight. Lots of disabled folks were in that room, and I bumped into some of them the rest of the weekend. Interactions like that always make huge and overwhelming conferences feel rewarding.
Yes, saying that SXSW is a huge event is an understatement, and I saw how much went into arranging accessibility logistics, at least for the interpreting side. I spent some time emailing with the interpreting coordinating folks before my trip, and I also met a few local deaf folks from Austin who volunteered on the accessibility planning team. Great to see.
Even though not every session was interpreted/captioned (the dream), it was still possible to request access for any formal sessions in advance, and all the keynotes/featured panels had interpreting or at least captioning available. (Those also happened to be sessions I was interested in.) So throughout the weekend, I enjoyed hopping around and darting in and out of different sessions as I pleased — not an experience I always have at conferences, and one that made me feel free and curious, less tethered by my ongoing “accessibility planning” internal monologue than I usually am.
Access may take thought and planning, but it can be empowering. Always worth saying.
4) There’s still a lot of awareness to raise
I feel like I always end with this note: “there’s still more work to be done!” Because there is.
One case in point (among others): my new SXSW-Airbnb friends and I were curious about going to the much-hyped XR experience exhibition on Sunday. We got there, wandered around and saw long lines and lots of people wearing giant extended-reality headsets. All very futuristic, which frankly did make me want to run away to the woods for a while.
Nevertheless, I was curious to put on a headset and try one of these “immersive” storylines or experiences or whatever they are. But every single time I found someone and asked if their XR headset had captions, their jaw dropped and they stammered a bit and said “Oh, no, sorry.”
I was not surprised. Which is unfortunate, but it’s also what I know to expect from many years in this hearing world. It’s also (yet another!) example of existing social/cultural bias being built into tech from the beginning — even though I can think of plenty of ways captioning, ASL, and other multimodal types of interaction could enrich how we interact in virtual reality (and real reality).
“You should add captions!” I told several XR-futuristic people this, and then I left to go look for more tacos. My weekend in a nutshell, right there.
Meghan Markle!!! Okay after being starstruck by the Duchess I really enjoyed reading about your experience. What a wild space! Those XR goggles kind of make me want to run into the woods too….
I have always been curious about SXSW. Really glad to know they are incorporating accessibility into the event to the extent they are.