“Denied Accessibility”

Original link: https://tyingknots.net/2023/05/against-access/

In the summer of 2023, the second deliberation draft of the National People’s Congress draft of the “Barrier-free Environment Construction Law” is in full swing. Barrier-free construction regulations in Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Zhuhai and other places have been implemented in recent years, combined with government information disclosure, smart city, civilized city construction and other projects. However, in this blossoming window of opportunity, the pursuit of convenience by the disabled is still full of anger, frustration and helplessness: the steep ramp that can pass the electric car, but makes the wheelchair topple over; The chaotic and superimposed broadcast noise makes it impossible to locate the elevator; the ” sign language digital person ” cannot be understood; the ” universal Braille ” invented and transformed by discerning experts… Planning and decision makers take “inclusiveness” and “barrier-free” as their core A lot of budget and technical costs have been invested in the name, but with little effect, or even counterproductive.

This is not simply a dilemma with “Chinese characteristics”. It reflects the power relationship between the disabled community and non-disabled experts, which is worth pondering. Blind and deaf poet John Lee Clark (John Lee Clark) proposed “against access” in this article, showing the parental mentality and wishful thinking of “I’m for your own good” in the discourse of information accessibility. Clark recalled his experience of fighting wits with sign language interpreters when he was growing up, and how the blind and deaf community learned to put aside the middleman and find ways to directly touch and communicate with each other. As he writes, the obsession with “accuracy,” the insistence on “perfect replicas,” in information-accessible discourse is merely an effort to maintain the status quo. “We messed up traditional spaces and rearranged them to make these places fit us, rather than us fit into them.”

This article is translated and disseminated with the authorization of John Lee Clark himself.

Original Author / John Lee Clark
Original link / https://audio.mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html
Translation / Proofreading and editing by Xin Che / Lin Zihao

This game baseball, signed by Minnesota Twins player Chuck Knoblauch and Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett, is the only surviving proof of my childhood love for sports s things. Although I am gradually losing my sight due to Usher Syndrome, ” “DeafBlind” is not an accurate term to describe me. It makes more sense to say that I was born deaf, became blind, and grew into the “blind and deaf” identity I am today. As a kid, I collected tens of thousands of cards with baseball stars on them, and would often open my eyes to read the fine print. Today, those boxes with the cards are long gone; all that’s left is this baseball. I never thought that one day I would consider giving it away, but now, I do. Should I keep it? It doesn’t take up much space. But what does it matter to me now? It’s like a rock on the moon, a lone thing outside space and time. Minneapolis Star Tribune staff writer Jim Fuller was the one who gave me this baseball with a smile. At that time, Jim came to my house to interview my father about his contribution to the establishment of a bilingual Deaf charter school. It didn’t take long for Jim to figure out that I was an avid sports fan, so we were scribbling on paper and talking about our mutual favorite Twins. Later he said that he would surprise me next time he came. It was the summer of 1993, and I received this baseball, but it brought back my happiest memories of sports, but it was related to what happened two years ago-1991, the most exciting American baseball game in history. In the AFC World Series, Kobe Proctor hit a beautiful off-field home run to lead the team into the seventh inning. At that time, I was so excited that I couldn’t breathe; John Smoltz and Jack Morris pitched against each other on the field. In the bottom of the 10th inning, Smalls was out, Alejandro Pena had a backup, and a Twins player doubled on a fly ball. After a few at-bats the field was full and the first pitch was a broken baseball before the next batter hit. Dan Gladden, formerly known as Clinton Daniel Gladden III, aka “the Dazzle Man,” sprints to second base (thus creating the Opportunity), the whole universe, the whole world, and myself all boiled up in an instant. Nothing was more “witnessing” the moment he landed on home plate; any attempt to describe it in words was pointless. Language itself has become too oblique. But it took me a long time to realize this. After not being able to “witness” these historical moments, I still care about sports, and I still believe that I can still listen to sports news, watch game scores, have someone sit next to me to watch the game from time to time, even on my own Read linguistically accurate sports coverage. Just thinking about it makes me happy. Isn’t baseball the same as literature? So when I found myself getting less and less interested in sports, I was really confused – I stopped watching the Super Bowl after a few years when the TV screen was blurring in my eyes, stopped this I remember Just started the tradition. I also unsubscribed from ESPN’s magazine, even though it’s one of the few magazines available in Braille. Then there’s only Bill Simmons, the great storyteller sports writer I read occasionally. I admit that only excellent writing can sustain my interest in sports these days. But even Bill Simmons’ op-ed has grown dull. What happened? At first, through an interpreter, everything I read and heard was related to the athletes I had worshiped with my eyes. I know their faces and their movements, the way they lick their upper lip, complain, stare, gasp in surprise or delight. But as they retired one by one, the poetic connection I could feel diminished, replaced by new, strange, meaningless names. Direct experience lingers in your memory long—meaning that sport still resonates with me many years after my last encounter with it. But when the direct experience was gone, I realized that I could never have the same life as before. Disability rights advocates have long campaigned for accessibility services, most of which are achieved with basic, unobtrusive amenities. Today, billions of dollars are poured into programs aimed at increasing environmental inclusivity. It’s not that I don’t appreciate restaurants that have Braille menus. It is also very important to me that the street lights have vibration sensors that remind “there are no cars around, it is safe to cross the road”. Those computer programs created in the name of accessibility allowed me to write this article. Ramps, elevators, wide gates, flashing lights, handrails, seats, assistants, attendants, technology of all kinds…all of these are undoubtedly very important. Yet the way these services have been lobbied, funded, designed, set up, and used has always been based on the assumption that we live in a single world. This kind of thinking naturally ignores the wide range of possibilities in the same mode of life.

One of the questions I get asked the most by hearing and seeing people is, “What should I do to make my website/exhibition/movie/show/concert, etc. accessible to you?” Companies, schools, non-profits Agencies, states, and federal agencies have been asking those of us who are blind and deaf all the time, desperate for answers: “What can we do to be more accessible?”

This obsession with “accessibility” is stifling. I really want to say, “I really don’t care about you guys?” But the sincerity in their words always makes me dumbfounded, obviously their arrogance is almost overflowing the screen. Why always focus on them? Why are they always tolerant of us? Why is it never for us to decide whether we tolerate them? In fact, our group is in the midst of a transformation. We have the first true tactile language called Protactile. Whether it’s groping around or moving forward, or touching every item and everyone around us, we insist on doing everything in our own way. We mess up traditional spaces, rearranging them to make these places fit us, not us fit them. And this “touch language movement” is also obsessed with direct experience. As the deaf-blind architect Robert Sirvage recently said, we should not start with the question “How can we be more accessible?” but rather, “What is pleasurable?” Listening to people When Heshiren friends join us, they have to learn touch language, learn how to cooperate and socialize with us in our space. They’ll find themselves closing their eyes a lot, either really or squinting, because sight is never a requirement here. They, too, will find it normal to touch each other’s bodies, as we have. Since the word “accessibility” appeared, it mainly refers to those tools or means that supplement people’s sensory experience. Subtitles for movies, TV shows, and videos are good examples. These are services for the deaf, but I want to emphasize that there are already enough images flying by on the screen to distract them. When blind people request audio description services, this reasonable accommodation only adds to what they have already heard. For example, when the king shouts “Follow me, brave knights!”, the audio description may effectively capture him brandishing his sword and his cloak fluttering in the wind; Deaf people can listen to the radio and watch TV and movies “without barriers”. But this isn’t supplemental accessibility at all; it’s a replica, and a replica that’s completely removed from the original. That’s how we feel about “accessibility” services, which seem like a pathetic excuse to cover up the culprits of the barrier. Accessibility itself often becomes the only dead end available to us : pictorial descriptions without images, lyrics without music, raised lines without color on paper, labels without objects, explanations without emphasis. In the United States, tens of thousands of American Sign Language interpreters (hereinafter referred to as sign language interpreters) have received professional training to facilitate communication in the most accurate and fair way. You can say they are human flesh subtitles. Under the framework of various cultural differences between American Sign Language and English, their rigorous translation may be able to provide perfect barrier-free services for sighted and deaf people, which is what people often call “supplementary” in various environments Accessibility Services. But for us deaf and blind, sign language interpreters are cruel. They have always stood between us and others, preventing us from having direct contact with others. Unknowingly, this has also become one of the reasons for the birth of Qinyu in 2007. A group of deaf-blind community leaders in Seattle decided to hold meetings and workshops without an interpreter, and that’s when Touch Language began to take hold. To the surprise of our group of deaf-blind people, the activities went very smoothly, and the participants were able to rotate and communicate directly with different people. The success of this event has greatly inspired us to break the taboo associated with “touch”, including touching each other’s bodies instead of waving hands in the air. Immediately afterwards, the syntax for instructing how to use the touch language appeared, and a whole new language was born. As this form of communication emerges, we are also saying goodbye to the most prevalent mode of accessibility among us: interpretation by sign language interpreters. Obviously, this is no coincidence of timing. That day, September 11, 2001, taught me why dealing with translators was so frustrating for me before Touch Language came along. I was taking a postcolonial literature class at the University of Minnesota, and I wasn’t watching the news before class. When I got to the classroom, two sign language interpreters were already there. Immediately they asked me, “Did you hear the news that a plane hit two towers?” I laughed, “No, but it sounds interesting. Rudyard Gibb will be discussed in class today “Kim” by Rudyard Kipling. Can we discuss now, using this sign language name for Kipling and this sign language name for Jim? So that we can distinguish the author from the character. OK? “Long silence. So I repeated again, “Okay?” “Okay… okay,” they replied, acting strangely. The professor came, and the atmosphere in the classroom became weird. He asked if we were okay, if there was any family in New York? Does anyone need time off? I read the news a few hours later to understand what happened. People must be sad, crying. All the TV screens were showing the same picture, over and over. And sadly, my translator failed to tell me this in any meaningful way. Why? Because their job is just to “provide accessibility services”, just to translate the spoken content in the classroom. Fast-forward to one of the biggest achievements of the TouchLanguage movement so far: a whole new breed of translator has been created. In 2017, we established the National Training and Resource Center for Deaf-blind Interpreters and began to hold a week-long immersive interpreter training led by deaf-blind pro-touch language experts. When I first developed this project, my colleagues and I quickly realized that the point of this move was not to help translators become proficient in proficiency, but to completely reshape the role of “translator”. Different from previous translators who provided so-called “accurate and objective information” but in vain created counterfeits based on their own feelings about the world, pro-touch language translators must be our reporters, partners, “accomplices”. “. Generally speaking, sign language interpreters are system-centric and placed in platforms, classrooms, conferences or video calls, and act only when a person speaks. But in fact, there has always been power inequality in the relationship between Tingren teachers and deaf students, Tingren bosses and deaf employees, etc. It is only by acknowledging these power inequalities that we can understand why sign language interpreters often “belong” to the hearing party rather than the deaf party. This is only slightly problematic for the sighted deaf, but the impact on the blind and deaf is devastating. On the contrary, the touch language translator is user-centered, standing firmly with us and following us to explore various situations. We also admit, of course, that in most “distantist” spaces (that is, people don’t touch each other at all, just see each other from a distance), our presence has little value. For us, the key question in working with translators is: what exactly do “we” want out of the relationship? What we want is never to listen to or see people to do, because they never ask us: “Shall we do this together? How do you want to do this?” What they want to do is just Just “include” us. So what has changed with the translator’s role? Let me tell you a little story: At the beginning of the new crown epidemic, a blind and deaf friend told me the story of her and a touch language interpreter I trained. She was going to see a doctor, and the interpreter made an appointment to meet her at the door of the clinic building. Walking into the waiting room, the interpreter said, “Wow, everyone here is super nervous and talking about the new crown. The news of the epidemic is also playing on the TV, do you want me to paraphrase it? Or eavesdrop on the doctor over there To that group of people, they seem to be talking about masks?” My friend waved his hand across the interpreter’s chest and said no: “No need. How about the place you went to-” “Okay, Okay,” he interrupted, “of course we can chat about my travels, but I want to double check: do you know what coronavirus is?” “No.” “Oh my god. That’s it, okay okay .You listen carefully: the new crown is big news about the world!” He grabbed her by the shoulder, pretending to shake her, and emphasized to her the seriousness of the matter. After listening to the interpreter’s explanation, my friend was stunned, eager to know what was said on TV, and also had many questions in his heart that he wanted to ask the doctor. Obviously, the pro-touch translator became my friend’s friend, and while his opinion was added to the conversation, it was very important. He found out that my friend was extremely insensitive about the new crown virus and urged her to find out. And sign language interpreters will never do that unless they let their instincts get the better of them and dictate their professionalism. In teaching, whenever I ask the sign language interpreters to share their opinions and comments, they always protest, “But I don’t want to affect the blind and deaf!” I replied, “If you worry about affecting us, you can tell yourself It’s too important to look down on us.” Another thing sign language interpreters habitually do is to describe the whole picture of things. For example, when entering a room, they stop and say, “This is a medium-sized room with a few tables here, there, and there. And, let me count, one, two, three, four, five.” Six…six windows.” I’ll cut them off here: “Why are you stating, stating, stating this stuff to me? What you’re trying to do is not present this room like a waiter with a tray …I don’t want this plate. What I want, is to invade this room, to occupy it, like other people do. If this room is not worth occupying, then I will take it. I think it is worth “stealing” Please, please, let’s do it again. What we have to do is touch the people and things here together, and talk about our opinions and feedback at the same time.” Although I have been traveling alone to various places and places Space, interacting with people according to the logic of things and the surrounding environment, but it is good to have a fellow traveler with sight (such as an interpreter). Their company, in a way, meant that I was able to reach out to people who were standing outside my sphere of exploration, against a wall, or in between points. If the person does not know the language of touch, the interpreter can quickly translate what I want the other person to do, such as asking the other person to put his hand on my hand, and then give me feedback with the other hand; or why I need help from the other person chest/arms/legs to describe what I want to express. I can indeed establish this kind of relationship with strangers without the help of an interpreter, but there is always some trial and error in communication before the other party “gets” me. Sometimes the other party forgot to give me enough feedback, and the interpreter was just able to supplement the other party’s reaction conveyed to me. Not obsessing over details and quickly reading what’s going on are very important skills for spying on enemy situations. But sign language interpreters were framed by the dogma of “neutrality” and “objectivity” from the very beginning. They will always say: “A tall, thin, fair-skinned, curly black-haired man is walking past us, wearing a white vest, jeans, and brown leather boots…” They avoid it for themselves. Take pride in racial and gender descriptions. “No, no, no,” I rubbed their arms with both hands excitedly, showing dissatisfaction, “You shouldn’t paraphrase like this. Your description can be used to describe a beautiful Latin girl wearing fashionable and expensive boots , the whole body exudes the breath of money; but it can also be used to describe a pale, tall and thin white male, with messy hair, torn boots, and maybe looking angry. They are completely different people, right? But they fit the exact same ‘sterile’ description.” Because translators are afraid of showing personal bias, I’ll discuss four potential “safety nets” here to allow them to relax. It’s better to express your own thoughts: first, we are really not that fragile, so we won’t get into trouble if you say something inappropriate. We (not you, mind you), have a mission of our own. We are responsible for us, not you. Second, I want to tell you a story, a story that happened before the era of kiss language, and the best translator I have ever met: he is not a professional translator, but a volunteer. Because of this, his narration was so raw that I learned a lot from him. He happened to be deaf and racist and misogynistic, but I was able to separate his bias from the message he was sending me. I would ask my translator students: “Are you a shameless bigot? No? Then you really have nothing to worry about!” This guy didn’t translate badly because of his arrogance; on the contrary, he did a good job — for me, he became an open source of information, everything in his head, including his biases, was laid out. I say to my students, “You don’t want his arrogance; but you want his talent for never thinking twice.” Third, if you’re so worried about expressing personal opinion, consider what I said The “cluster subjectivity” (collective subjectivity). Suppose a hundred viewers see someone strolling into a room, in Gladwellian fashion. By discussing small social events, Gladwell’s work is often subtle and unexpected.) In the blink of an eye, all of them have come to a hundred slightly different conclusions based on their own life experience. Some of the interpreters, who may also happen to be fashion experts, saw that the attendees’ seemingly expensive boots were knockoffs. Nevertheless, there are some common cultural symbols that most people in a hundred can recognize, whether they think right or not. The question is: what exactly is the message to the group as a whole? Perhaps a certain moment is indeed as rumored, worthy of a description of thousands of words, but we really don’t have time to listen to long speeches to come to a so-called reasonable conclusion – if we can really come to such a conclusion, after all, our world is not Not a purely two-dimensional flat world. At the end of the day, it’s very helpful to have a lieutenant who can tell us if we’re welcome or not. Fourth, since there’s the Glavel-style wink, there’s the Clark-style (Annotation: Refers to the author himself) slipping, flapping, shaking hands. What I want to say is that no matter what we bump into, smell, film, or brush against our skin, we are all gathering intelligence in our own way. That’s why, when translators try to translate failed knockoffs based on their own experience, we shouldn’t stop, but keep gathering important information along the way. There is a chance that this information will confirm, refute, or deepen what the interpreter is conveying. After helping more than 200 sign language interpreters reborn as touch language interpreters, I finally began to understand why people in the field of accessibility are obsessed with the concept of “accuracy.” This obsession with “accuracy” and insistence on “perfect replicas” is just trying to maintain the status quo. We are expected not to change the status quo; if the status quo must change, do so in the smallest amount possible. In this way, accessibility becomes a one-way assimilation (nonreciprocal assimilation), with two consequences: we either die trying to fit in, or die failing to fit in. The touch language movement is our attempt to escape counterfeits. Throughout the history of the deaf, generations of hearing educators have deliberately moved sign language closer to the dominant written language. They spelled first letter by letter with their fingers, and then word by word. Things always revolve around mainstream languages, but no one has ever cared about what real sign language can bring. For example, that unintentionally hilarious effort to be “exact” is precisely the language system of Signing Exact English. Likewise, in the history of the blind, reading by touch and raised lines on books followed immediately after the printed word. After it turned out that blind people took a long time to follow these lines with their fingers with difficulty, vision educators stingyly made these lines larger and easier to feel. Braille, as a different world – a world of dots (rather than lines) – was not developed at all at the time, nor has it been fully embraced as a language in its own right as a medium of communication, but There are still so many people who worry about being able to accurately represent written language in Braille. Of course, the question is not accuracy itself, but whose accuracy it is. In recent years, there has been a trend on the Internet, calling on people to add text descriptions to pictures and criticizing those who do not deserve text. This is certainly an example of “cluster responsibility,” but those who yell the most and correct others most are precisely those who see people. Most of the time, this behavior is self-defeating: I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to stop reading video subtitles because the captions were crammed with too many words. Some of the subs are really short and to the point, but I’ll always pray that I don’t get any subs. Get to the point quickly, please! It’s ironic that we create barriers in the way we go to great lengths to achieve accessibility. After I mentioned this at a panel, one of the participants hilariously relayed what I meant, and we were all amused. She said, “Mary is wearing green, blue, and red stripes; every fourth stripe has a purple dot the size of a pea, and there are a total of forty-seven stripes on the whole dress…” “I want to laugh Dead,” I said, “Stop it, stop it!” But really, she went on, at least what was on Mary’s clothes didn’t matter to her at all when they weren’t the focus of the picture. The most important message in the picture is that Mary is smiling and holding her diploma. But then she hesitated again, “Should I say ‘Mary is holding her diploma and showing a big smile’, or ‘Mary is smiling enthusiastically’, or ‘Mary is grinning with teeth and wrinkles around her eyes’?” The answer very simple. “Mary is holding her diploma and smiling big” is the best option—that’s what’s called the “don’t think too much” option. My opinion on this is largely influenced by the philosopher Brian Massumi’s “esqueness” (Annotation, English “-esque” is used as a suffix to indicate style, manner. Here it can be understood as the quality of things. trait or essence.) This concept inspires. He uses the example of a child who turned into a tiger:

A child is looking at a tiger, no matter how fleeting and incomplete the sight, whether the tiger is in a zoo or in a book or in a movie or video, bam! The child suddenly became a tiger… The perception itself is a vital gesture. At the moment of seeing the tiger, the child does not imitate the specific form of the tiger, but immediately imbues the tiger with life—even more life than it has. The child played the tiger when he had never seen a tiger; more than that, the child played the tiger when no one had ever seen a tiger and there was no such species on earth.

Just as the kid has nothing in common with a real tiger, the phrase “Mary has a big smile on her face” has nothing in common with a picture of Mary holding her diploma. But tigers can really show their essence to the world. A child can also be “tiger-ized” and become “tiger-esque”. Every action he makes is showing the world Announcing “I’m a tiger!” This picture of Mary at her graduation is as much announcing as the words “Mary has a big smile on her face.” Beyond the actuality of each thing, there is a vortex where each actuality collides, stirs, and meets. We’d better give up the fantasy of believing that we can reproduce fundamental things in fields other than their birthplace. We should let them stay where they belong, or transgress, translate, and transform them in multiple possibilities. We can give otherworldly things a new purpose, which may be completely or slightly different from their original purpose. One example is UNO, a widely distributed braille version of the card game. In its standard braille version, dots are printed on the corners of each card to indicate the attributes and numbers of each card, such as “Y5” representing the yellow number five card. But in practice, this deck is very, very slow to play. If it weren’t for the touch language that made us tear up the rules of judging people, I would continue to fumble out those little dots like a fool. What is more suitable for us should be our handmade UNO, which contains cards of different textures and shapes, which we call “texture multi-shaped cards”. In this intimate version of UNO, you can feel the hesitation of the opposite player, and you can also make a joking gesture when accepting a velvet star card. In this way, the attention of all players is on each other: for example, other players will touch your hand when you are meditating; the knees of the opposite players will sometimes push your knees to tease you. Should you play the velvet cubes, or the rayon stars? But our revamp of the UNO cards is much more than that – ideally with up to four players who can sense what all the cards are at any given time. This way they can have a good game of cards, or when one player plays the cards, the remaining three can chat with each other in kiss language. While four is the ideal player cap, the number of textured multi-shape cards is still relatively small compared to the original UNO cards, and we changed the rules of the game accordingly. In addition, the “magic card” is also where we spread our inspiration and use different fabrics! This has turned into a whole new game, which is also inherently more inclusive than UNO. You see, the environment around us has infinite potential and vitality. But for thousands of years, this vitality has been forbidden, and we have been forced to match the world of hearing and seeing. And now, we are finally flying in our respective skies.

Seeing and hearing people is always hard to accept and we are genuinely happy for them. But why are they never happy for us? They just want to use us to make themselves happy. The trepidation that many of them feel when they meet a blind and deaf person is partly due to their belief that we cannot enjoy the things they hold dear. They try to assuage this unease by insisting that we accept their world, asking, “Our world is a good one, isn’t it?” But that’s the bad side of accessibility: it comes at our expense, satisfy others. We didn’t realize how much we paid for digestive accessibility until kissing inspired us to be in our own way; seeing and hearing people didn’t realize how much they were missing out by denying access to our world Wonderful.

In April 2020, I made a small but meaningful move. There was an online journal that wanted a photo of me to go with it and publish three of my poems. Although there must be pictures and texts to make the photos “accessible”, I have always wanted to do something about publishing photos. In fact, I don’t know much about the rules behind the media form of the author’s headshot. I was thinking: why do I have to provide a headshot? As if I knew what it meant, or knew it was what I wanted to say. To my surprise, the journal agreed that I should not provide photos. Instead, write a few sentences, accompanied by a tactile description, about how it would feel to touch me in real life. As with my bio, I changed the text, and now it reads: “Has short cat-soft hair, warm, smooth hands that smell like patchouli, jiggles, exudes happy mood.”

A few months later, Terra Edwards, a good audiovisual researcher of pro-touch language and a good friend of mine, told me that she wanted to avoid publishing as much pro-touch as possible in our publications from now on. I was very excited when I heard that images were used in the related content of Touch Language. Our research team has created a website called “the Protactile Research Network” without any photos, logos or images, just words! On the “People” page where we wrote our personal introduction and resume, we put everyone’s “tactile impression” (tactile impression). I like what Tyra wrote: “Strong hands, responsible for the atmosphere in the chat, with the possibility of frequent passionate slaps.”

Hayley Broadway, a deaf-blind researcher who is currently exploring touch-language acquisition with deaf-blind children, writes: “Wear fashion and tactile clothing that will put your finger on your head while you meditate. Draw circles on your body. When you talk to her, you will continue to feel her pat and pinch. She will even slap you when she gets agitated. Face the risks of talking to her~”

Let my dearest friend, hero, and mainstay of the touch-language movement, Jelica Nuccio, end this article with a big hug: “Her story is tender and smells Like lavender. She leads you in slowly, then grabs your heart. She laughs at you, and you can’t help laughing with her.”

about the author

John Lee Clark is a National Magazine Award-winning author and 2020-21 Disability Futures Fellow. His first collection of essays is titled Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience (Handtype Press, 2014). He is currently working on a second collection of essays. He and his family reside in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Translator introduction

Cheeky, a squid.

Zi Hao, in the process of getting started with touching language.

This article is translated and disseminated with the authorization of John Lee Clark himself.

Translated and excerpted from Touching the Future: Essays by John Lee Clark. Copyright © 2023 by John Lee Clark. Used with permission of the publisher, WW Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. This article also appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Issue 64 period, the full text has no audio content.

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