YouTube and Disability Activism

Last Sunday, I was moved to post about Flickr and disability history; today, I'm watching another online forum for user-generated content. It's hard to get mainstream news cameras to point away from the red carpet on Oscar weekend; but it's not hard to put a video on YouTube, and quite a few videos from the Jerry Lewis protests are already up (as I type this, the Oscars haven't started yet). Here's a digest of the ones I can find.

DESCRIPTION: These involve long interviews with Sarah Watkins, Simi Linton, Laura Hershey, and others, articulating the points of the community's objections to a humanitarian award going to Lewis. The visuals involve a lot of bright fluorescent posterboards and crowds behind the interviewees.

September 23: Ray Charles (1930-2004)

"I don't think I'm good because I'm blind; I think I'm good because I'm good."

It's the 76th anniversary of the birth of Ray Charles (born Ray Charles Robinson), on this date in 1930, in Albany, Georgia. He was blind from glaucoma by age seven, the age when he was enrolled at a state boarding school for deaf and blind children.

Charles' dark glasses, a Yamaha keyboard marked in braille, braille magazines, chess set, and several costumes were donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History last year.

There are a number of vintage Ray Charles performance videos available on YouTube: go check out the 1961 "Hit the Road Jack" if you want to mark the man's birthday today...or "In the Evening" if you want to hear his piano work, or "Georgia" if you're feeling nostalgic.

ASL, the Lost Experience, and YouTube

"The Lost Experience" is a summer ARG (alternative reality game) meant to keep fans of the ABC television series "Lost" engaged until the new episodes air in the fall. One component has been the search for clues, in the form of "glyphs," strings of characters that can be used to access seventy video fragments, which will in turn eventually be assembled into a bigger picture. Players from all over work together to solve anagrams, codes, and literary and scientific references. Clues have appeared in television commercials, on websites, on phone messages, on t-shirts and wristbands, on the display in Times Square, and yesterday, a clue appeared.... in American Sign Language, in a YouTube video. (The "glyph" is part of the symbol on the signer's shirt; the signer's message does not match the video's voice-over, but instead communicates details for the game's story.)

You can follow how the players responded to this in the comments at The Lost Experience Clues blog. It didn't take long for a few regular players with ASL fluency to be found, and online (partly in chat) they worked on a translation together--discussions have touched on problems such as the video's quality (too grainy for the fingerspelling to be easily read, even in slowed down versions), the signer's distracting attire, the close-cropping of the video (for game purposes, the signer's face cannot be shown, and the gamers have discussed how that hinders ASL communication somewhat). Some players posted slower or false-colored versions of the video, to be helpful. So, hundreds, maybe thousands (the video has been viewed over 1500 times in its first day), of Lost gamers are learning something about ASL, or using what they already know, this week.

Elsewhere on YouTube... Caughtya.org recently linked to a wicked New Zealand public service announcement about accessible parking, definitely worth a peek. There's a lot of junk on YouTube, but there's also a lot of potential, like most formats.