In this episode contributor Lauren Cornwell interviews Betty Siegel, Director of VSA and Accessibility at the Kennedy Center, to discuss technology, accessibility and inclusion. This is part 1 of a two-part episode. Continue listening to part 2 here.

PART 1:

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Alyssa: Hello, listeners, and welcome to the Arts Management and Technology Lab podcast. My name is Alyssa and I am the Podcast Producer. In this episode contributor Lauren Cornwell interviewed Betty Siegel, Director of VSA and Accessibility at the Kennedy Center, to discuss technology, accessibility and inclusion. This episode is divided into two parts. We hope you enjoy the first half of the interview.

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Lauren Cornwell: So, welcome to the arts management and technology podcast. I'm Lauren Cornwell and today joining me I have Betty Siegel, the director of VSA and Accessibility at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, DC. So today we'll be talking a bit about the intersection of technology, accessibility and inclusion… Betty, I know you've had a very extensive background working on the creation of equity access and inclusion initiatives across arts organizations, so I was wondering if you could maybe start off by telling us what you feel that some of the key components are to creating and sustaining a culture of accessibility and inclusion in today's arts organization?

Betty Siegel: Oh, that's such a great question. What I, I have to rephrase it, so you may have to help me.

LC: Yeah.

BS: So, what are the key elements? Yeah, what are some of the creating and sustaining focus on inclusion? Absolutely... One of the most critical components in that I believe in is that is, is a level of commitment. That has to be from the top down and from the bottom up within any institution. Accessibility does not thrive, unless there actually really is buy-in from everyone. So I think that's a critical element to inclusive programming. It has to be an adopted and articulated value and it has to be sincere and actually executed value. So, we tend, I think, you know, a lot of issues say, “Oh, we support equity access and inclusion”. You know, we want to welcome everyone and all of those words are beautiful and I really my little heart just starts to pound when I hear those but until I see you actually take those words and put them into action in a real life way, then I tend to be a little bit skeptical about the level of commitment that the institution of the organization so I think that's a really critical piece.

LC: No, excellent I definitely agree that you know, sometimes with organizations words are great but actions are always the game-

BS: And staff need to resource it, so that’s the other piece of it. So, your action is in the resourcing of, am I allowing staff time to go towards this issue? Am I empowering the staff good decision? Is there, am I positioning someone to be the champion for whatever the topic is, in my case champion for accessibility? Because we often have to, I don't want to speak on behalf of people to suppose because that's really not where we try to go. We always want people to speak on behalf of themselves to create that space. But oftentimes, decisions are being made in an environment where the person that the decision is going to impact is at the table.

LC: Absolutely. Do you have any advice for up and coming arts managers or even seasoned arts managers who are really looking to better that community engagement and really bring the people to the table who should be involved in these decisions?

BS: Absolutely. Whether it's advice that I really do love, the same from the disability community movement itself, which is nothing about us without us. And some people have even shorten that same to say it shouldn't, it should just be nothing about us. Period. It's not about doing for, it's doing with, and, and allowing that community to… to be active, meaningful participants in whatever's happening at the institution. So, for arts administrators and managers, number one, be sure that those voices are at the table and make sure you're looking not just to how we're reaching out to audiences or visitors, but talk about who are we hired? What are the artists? What's the content that we're putting on? And are we really representing and positioning members of these various communities that have been disenfranchised for such a long time, and in my case, empowering and allowing the voices of people with disabilities to be a meaningful part of all of the work that we do across institution? So that's a really special charge, like a basically what I'm saying is please change the world and make everything better for everybody and do that. Arts administrator - go for it.

LC: [laughter] Fantastic. Um, so then I guess as we're talking more about, I guess, sort of thinking of solutions, and what are the things that we can do? Moving it to what do you think are some technology-based solutions that arts institutions can use to facilitate this type of engagement specifically with programming?

BS: Right. That's an interesting conversation. So I'm, I love technology. I actually, my colleagues think that I'm technologically … not very advanced technologically, and sometimes I'm not, but actually I'm really fascinated with technology that has a real life application. Really, if it's solving a real life problem that I'm super duper interested in. If it's really abstract technology, I just can't wrap my brain around it. So, when it comes to technology, and the inclusion of people with disabilities, we have to really be conscious of the fact that technology can be very inclusive. So just think about your, your little phone device that you carry around with you everywhere. And think about how just having this little thing, and using it in a very not technologically advanced way, using it as a keyboard and a display, I can have a conversation with someone who stuff that I wouldn't have been able to have quite so easily in the past. Because we can just type on my phone back and forth to each other. We can text each other. How cool is that in real time. So all of a sudden communit-, that communication environment, some of the barriers to communication are, are gone. And it's and it's super simple. It's super actually looked at, right? That's a really inclusive thing that this phone does.

But on the other hand, it's a touch enabled technology, and to be honest, why people use these phones too, but it's because the entities created this smart device got kind of slapped across the, you know, a little slap across the head because they weren't creating it as accessible technology. So how would a blind person use a touchscreen? Well, then they had to work in the [inaudible] the accessibility features for voice activated voice recognition. A million other things, you know, just making so that you can change the font size is really important, or what kind of the background, and so they really had to work to add in those accessibility features. To make this thing that now drives our - this thing being the phone - that drives our life available to everyone to you. So I love technology when it's inclusive, and enables those communication moments to happen and I don't like it when it's explosive, and it cuts people. So that's a really simple there's tons of really cool technology that's coming around. There are trends that I certainly see in technology that are being used in museum and theater, other cultural environments that are that I find really interesting right now.

LC: Can you maybe talk a little more about some of those specific technologies sure that maybe, even if you don't endorse them necessarily? [laughter]

BS: Not allowed to endorse anything that they are not paying me, this is not a sales pitch at all. But I think what's really interesting is when we see in the, in the world of technology and cultural arts, we're really way behind like the technology that we've used for lots and lots of years now is old technology, assistive listening devices, for example. Those haven't changed, I don't think in 40 or 50 years, we still have, you know, basically four types of assistive listening systems we have those that are hardwired, certain on the plane, when you plug your headphone in, that's like our barter system listing system. There's the RF system radio frequency systems that we use. It's like having a little miniature radio station that you set up to broadcast the sound. There's the IR infrared, basically using infrared light to broadcast down to a receiver, the person and then one of the older technologies also as induction technologies, which broadcasts sound through a magnetic field.

Right, those are those are the four that have been around for forever. And the number of manufacturers are craving this technology is not getting bigger, it's getting smaller. So when I started in this field, I even had a list of, I don't know, 20 or 30 different companies, brands, manufacturers that you could buy this technology from. I think it's down to more like a handful of five, six companies producing this technology. I don't actually think that's good for the community. There's not enough competition to drive new innovation in the field of assisted listening devices, so we're still working with really old technology to help one of our biggest populations, which are people with hearing loss. So what I sort of answer a question about what's new and people are playing around, finally somebody is playing around with new technology, which is still unable to system listen systems. I don't think they're there yet. Do not run out and buy a Wi Fi system listing system yet. But I find that there, the experimentation in that is actually really interesting because it could open up a lot of new and exciting moments.

There is a technology that's out there right now that we've tested at the Kennedy Center, a Wi Fi based a system of the system and what was really cool about it wasn't even necessarily the Wi Fi part of it. Because the truth, the matter of Wi Fi has too much of a lag to really work well in a theater environment. As a system, listen, that's what we learned. We tested it because the audience was tenacious. They kept saying they heard an echo. And what was happening was they were hearing the, because they had mild hearing loss, they were actually hearing the sound live from the actors on stage. They were hearing it ever so much of a little bit less, with a little bit of lag through the speakers that the sound for the whole audience was being shot through. And then they were hearing it a third time through the Wi Fi because there was just enough of a lag. As the sound was captured by the microphones sent back to a mixer sent back out that they, they kept telling us it was an echo. And indeed there was but what was cool about the technology that we tested, was that they had worked out or what the technology was developed in such a way that gave people that capacity to customize the sound to decide whether to ampt the highs or ampt the lows. And then hearing loss, you're hearing loss [inaudible] their vision have the same hearing. You have hearing loss at high and low frequencies etc. and the current technology just has on often volume control. This new technology had the ability to actually control to customize the experience to my hearing loss. So I could actually change it. So I was getting more high frequencies or more low frequencies. That was the cool thing. I'm telling you, if somebody would really grab ahold of that, and somehow apply that even to the older technology, what an amazing innovation. So, I just went off on a terrible tangent on you. I hope that's what you wanted to hear. I get so excited by this stuff! [laughter, hands clapping]

LC: No, absolutely! So, then – so, when we're looking at technology based in accessibility that's like currently on the market, I know, we've heard a lot about things like GalaPro?...

BS: Oh, yeah. So not allowed to endorse-

LC: Not allowed to endorse. But could you talk about maybe like some of your thoughts around technology like that, and maybe even some pros and cons, right?

BS: So it's really interesting. So I don't I, I'm not a developer of GalaPro I, but I have been watching its development. And I've been lucky to be to have the opportunity to try it out. And what, again, I might have a different take on what's innovative about the technology that but what GalaPRo does, as  - it's an app that you can download on your phone, and if you should go ahead and do that, because there's a little test demo at the [inaudible] in New York City and scroll to the very bottom, and there's a demo down there that they've done so you can actually see how it works. And if captioning what it's doing is it's capturing the show so that you can sit in the theater. And you can see the words going across your screen. It's not. It's not to not sized. It's not like supertitles for an opera. It's word for word. That's really really, really cool. I have a million ways to do that. I can.

At the Kennedy Center we have live - they're called writers, cart writers. And they can cart live to, um, to an iPad to your phone to a four-foot-long led sign that's on the screen to a TV monitor, to a computer monitor, monitor, the actual delivery the thing on which the caption is displayed. That's not innovative. Displayed and on your phone, that's not innovative. What's innovative with GalaPro is that they have, they’re the first company that I know of -and my experiences may be limited - that has figured out a way to automate that. So I in order to do capturing at the Kennedy Center for a live event have to have a live person there to actually either live right the show or take a show that script that's been input into some app and forward the text one line at a time in sync with the actors, right? GalaPro has automated that so that you enter the script. They have a combination of AI and the app has the ability to listen, and then to learn the script, and it will automatically sync it with the actor or whatever's going on onstage. That's the exciting part of GalaPro for me is that they've solved this big problem. Can we automate through voice recognition and I the caption instead of having to have a live person, because what that means for the deaf and hard of hearing person is that you can walk into a show that has the gala pro system as a part of it. And every single day, every single performance you can have captioning. And that that automation, that it's not. Sometimes it's financially not so feasible. And resource wise, it's not always feasible.

So that's what's exciting to me about it, I really hope that it some of the negatives to it get worked out. So, the negatives: you have to hold the phone. And I don't know we have to our shows if you were trying to hold for two and a half screen and not end up with it in your lap, which doesn't do the person who's hearing any good because they want to see the show. They don't want to be staring at the phone in their lap. So there are still – and, and because the system has to learn the show, it's not as useful to me they can't automate the haven't yet gotten where they can automate the one off. Right? So I have a show like Color Purple, School of Rock, Wicked, where the show comes in and it's gonna sit in my theater for four or five weeks, right? Then there's time for the system to learn the show. And then it's up and running for the four or five weeks,  the first week, maybe not so much. But after that it is but what if I've got a comedian who's just there for one night and there's no opportunity to learn the show for the AI, the voice recognition to learn the show that it just has to be live. So for theatre, like the Kennedy Center, where we do thousands of events a year, I'm not sure that GalaPRo solves our problem of having it available every night for every show. So that’s a con.

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Thanks for listening to the Arts Management and Technology Lab podcast series. You can read more on the intersection between the arts and technology at amt-lab.org. Or, you can listen to more interviews and discussions and our podcast series on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or Stitcher. Thank you for joining us.

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Audio translation for this series is done through Otter.ai.