3Dimensional title

A cane, sticky notes, another body addresses the different dimensions through which we have been thinking and making access across 2024 at Constant.

A cane speaks of physical objects. A cane can be used to support one leg while walking.

Sticky notes refers to small strategies. Sticky notes can be used to remind specific things to someone suffering from memory loss.

Another body tells the importance of considering our body as one in a network of many others, and how our needs for support and access differ and are always transitory.

Constant is a Brussels based organisation, which develops its artistic research around technologies, combining feminisms, activisms, free-culture philosophy, and other forms of care for and critical engagement with the world. The year 2024 was dedicated to accessibility, understood
in its multiple dimensions and senses, and it formed
the second thematic year of Constant’s 5-year trajectory called SPLINT, in which we explore the question:
what could/should SPeculative, Libre and INtersectional Technologies be.

As ecological and political catastrophes unfold at a worrying speed and intensity, it is urgent to pose ourselves the question of what technologies we need for life to be sustained and for resisting the computational monoculture. Access needs remind us that a solely “anti-tech” response is not a viable solution, that while we refuse the ‘always unlimited’ regimes of the GAFAMs, we need to continuously learn how the same limits impact everybody differently, that meeting basic needs for everyone will take everyone’s care.

In this Zine, we have gathered pieces and bits, traces, snippets, writings, images and sounds of the past year’s activities on and around multiple access questions, from building renovations to alt-text poetry. It is not a complete overview of last year’s programme, but a polyphonic, polymorphic, sometimes messy, but always engaged storytelling of our experiences. Most of all it is an opening for its readers to take this work and extend it in new directions and towards the future. It is also an invitation, if you feel tempted by this material, to get in touch, to join forces through multiplicity and divergences.

From a warpwarps on our website are articles documenting Constant's main activities. about Constant internal worksession: https://constantvzw.org/wefts/drempel.en.html

In March 2024, Constant organised an internal worksession called Drempel Drempel Drempel. “Internal” because this session gathered mainly Constant team, team members of its two main partners for the year 2024, Kaaitheater and Museum Dr. Guislain, and a few ‘external’ contributors: Loraine Further, Alyssa Gersony and Ahnjili Zhuparris. The session was an opportunity for us, as institutional workers, to examine and learn from different crossings, overlaps and gaps in our understanding of and effort towards accessibility.

Introduction: The teapots

To start things off we made a small introductory exercise. We asked each participant to draw the institution they're involved with in the shape of a teapot. This small exercise was to try to move away from the traditional introduction moments during which every person would present themselves with their name, role, etc and instead focus on their perspective on ‘their’ institution. It was also an attempt to take the attention away from the individual only and get to know them in relation to a specific context.

The week was organised around three main focus points:

1. Physical spaces: how to traverse them, how to make signage for them and other forms of institutional navigation.
2. Language: exploring the possibilities and challenges of multi-languages practices, a look at AI as access tools connected to language.
3. Digital spaces: exploring how the three institutions’ websites operate within certain guidelines and practices on accessibility.

Starting off with a definition

The term “accessibility” can feel overwhelming due to the myriad of things that it potentially conveys. Though it feels necessary not to shy away from it because it keeps reminding us of a work that is never finite, always in the process.

Throughout the rest of the days we delved into some texts to understand accessibility via different lenses. We understood that a unique definition for accessibility isn't helpful. It is an ever shifting and deeply intersectional and contextual concept. One of the starting texts we read gave us some historical context of the word ‘accessibility’:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, use of “accessible” as an adjective dates as far back as the fourteenth century, when it denoted being “capable of being entered or approached” and “readily reached.” It was only in 1961 that “accessible” began to be used to denote the ability to be “readily understood.” As a noun, “access” derives from the fourteenth-century Old French “accès” (denoting both the “coming on” or “attack” of an illness or emotion) and from the Latin “accessus” (“a coming to, an approach”). Describing “the power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something,” […].

“Access” can rectify exclusion; however, such efforts remain incomplete without a critical assessment of how those exclusions first came to be and how they continue to function. […] For radical disability activists, the tension in “accessibility” also arises from use of the term to denote inclusion in an unjust system—or, as activist organizer AJ Withers (2015) terms it, “accessing privilege.” In this view, a truly radical approach to accessibility requires considering the tensions between “accessibility” as a solution or checklist versus “accessibility” as an ongoing negotiation. For radical disability activists, the potential of “accessibility” is precisely to mark “access” as an ongoing and shifting process rather than as a mode of solving individualized problems.[…]

While “accessibility” is regularly presented as a way of extending social inclusion to those who have historically been marginalized by ableism or other forms of oppression, this conception of “access” regularly (though rarely explicitly) comes into conflict with “security culture,” “safe space,” or forms of intellectual engagement such as dense theoretical writing or complicated word usage not deemed to be “readily accessible.” Like “accessibility,” these forms of exclusion are also commonly presented as a self-evident good, in which access is deliberately restricted for some in order to create a different kind of access, or community, for others. Importantly, the access barriers created by “security culture,” “safe spaces,” or through particular kinds of intellectual engagement like “inaccessible” writing, are usually taken to be necessary. Indeed, these practices are often necessary in order to create boundaries so as to thwart different kinds of attacks by the state and other enemies. The result is that the assumed good of creating access is pitted against the assumed good of maintaining security, creating community, or deepening our understanding of ourselves and our world. Here, far from being a self-evident good, “access” functions as a kind of attack upon boundaries that have been constructed for a particular purpose.[…]

The question remains: how might we address the divide in radical practices between celebrating access and acknowledging the need for particular exclusionary spaces within radical milieus to defend ourselves from attack? If, despite its violence, exclusion is a category we want to embrace in certain moments (for example, in calls for sovereignty or in contests over occupation), then it may be through “access” as a boundary practice denoting both “contact” and “attack” that we might find the means of navigating this fraught terrain.

Excerpt from “Accessible” written by Kelly Fritsch
from the book “Keywords for Radicals:
The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle”.

Physical spaces

For the day on physical spaces, we started by telling each other about our offices and buildings. We shared what we thought needed thinking and intervention and how we were planning to go about it. We looked together at maps, videos and images.

There, the differences between our institutional realities became quite visible. For instance, Constant, whose office and studio space are not ‘public’, is not held by the same standards than the ones of Kaaitheater and Museum Dr.Guislain. They feel a sense of responsibility and care towards the public; the priority is to ensure the safety of the people in the space. This safety comes with many standards and regulations from various funding institutions that do not allow for much speculation/experimentation when thinking along the multi-layeredness of accessibility questions. Since Constant does not accommodate a big audience like Kaaitheater and Museum Dr. Guislain, it also allows us to take integral part to the thinking on access in our own spaces instead of having to hand over the whole process to external experts; without much space for collective thinking and making. Though, the differences in the scale of the buildings and resources of Kaaitheater and Museum Dr.Guislain showed significantly more possibilities for ambitious renovations and redoing regarding access than our DIY approaches/attempts. This does not mean that Constant will not aim for accessibility as do bigger institutions or that we will not look at standards and regulations in the process. In fact, we can allow ourselves to take these standards as a starting point and go beyond their rigidity to accommodate people's needs on a finer and more nuanced level. This type of work requires time, transparency, collaboration and solidarity with communities.

Signs exercise

“Sometimes we find people wandering in the hallways of the museum while they are searching to access the hospital.”

The question of orientation and signage came up several times in our discussions; it appeared that unclear, confusing or just non existent signs are a common issue in (public) buildings. Since we were thinking of access in relation to physical space, we proposed to work with signs as tools for facilitating access. We divided into three groups, each taking one area for experimenting with the possibilities of signage. One team was in the kitchen, one in the entrance and the third one in the garden. To introduce the exercise, we all followed a ritual by the collective MELT. We offered this ritual for the way that it makes us be thoughtful and attentive to the space we occupy.

“Ritual for bad listening: Take a piece of paper or your smartphone and for 5 minutes, write down every sound that you hear and/or sense (the humming of the heater, the chirping of a bird, the temperature in the room, the brightness of the light). Repeat this ritual in different settings if possible. When and where are you comfortable with listening/sensing? Do you listen/sense deeper with time? Are any of the things you hear/sense an access barrier for you or for someone you know? You can use this ritual as a way of checking in with a new space. This ritual is based on a text by Jonathan Smilges.”

Excerpt from CONF(FUSE)ING AND RE(FUSING) BARRIERS
by Ren Britton & Isabel Paehr

Examples of the signage exercise:

Sarah entered the kitchen, looked around and very pragmatically said “Well, this cannot be a public space”.

The team in the kitchen focused on the many ways that
the space could be hazardous; that angle was possibly prompted by the nature of the equipment generally present in kitchens. The signs were used to warn (slightly humorously) about the dangers present in the room.
The making of signs for the kitchen highlighted how much the studio’s kitchen made with a DIY ethos could constitute a barrier for many: a space relatively large becomes narrow because of the accumulation of appliances and scavenged items, a tap with sometimes scorching running water because of an old water boiler, a missing cooking hood which causes the room to sometimes fill with dense
smoke etc.

The team in the entrance proposed a prototype for another type of signage. They attached a yellow neon string from the entrance door throughout the hallway (around 10m long) to guide people. As we were all walking after one another holding the string in one hand, someone suggested “what about a large fluffy string to make it nicer?”
In this way, visitors are guided by holding the string and following it through the space; this was another type of signage that would not rely on visual clues. Though, a visual sign was still created to explain the presence and purpose of the string. The possibility of changing this visual sign into an audio one was also mentioned.

The group in the garden made use of the signs as a way of
conceptualising the function(s) or the potentialities
of the space. Here, the sign does not give operational information but instead invites the persons looking at it
to compose with it.

For the making of the signs, we used this tool: https://observatory.db.erau.edu/generators/signs/

Language and communication

Alt-text exercise

A series of exercises coming directly from https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/, a project developed by artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan.

We read each others’ communication materials and considered whether we understood what was communicated. We had a try at translating a text into simple language. Constant, who is used to being playful and experimental with languages, felt it was important to try to find a balance between its usual experimental modes and the necessity of simple language.

Example of exercise: The text describing the project ATNOFS on the feminist server ‘rosa’ was selected by one of the participants.

‘original’ text: rosa (they, them) is a feminist server that travels between different locations, providing a mobile infrastructure for learning, documentation, and experiments for the meetings that happened during the A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers project. rosa is not only its constituting hardware or software, but also the multitude of relations which are created around the making, maintaining and passing on of this infrastructure: the processes that are performed, the affective charge of their actioning, the communities around them.

the text rewritten by some of the participants: rosa (they, them) is a feminist travelling server. Rosa provided a digital space for learning, documentation and experiment for the meetings of the project called A traversal network of feminist servers. rosa is not only a technological device it is also a community with practices of making, maintaining and sharing.

Digital spaces

AI and Technoableism

One question that informed the preparation of the worksession, but was not clear when and how to bring it to the table, was the one regarding the many A.I.-fueled projects directly engaging with accessibility needs. The issue points to an intersection of different political vectors: companies with extremely exploitative and extractive agendas like Microsoft, OpenAI or Zoom are at the same time able to offer advanced software “solutions” for access needs. This includes for example automated closed captions during a videocall, image recognition of documents, automatically generating alt-text from an image and situational pictures that can help people with visual impairment as well as people who don't speak the bureaucratic language of the country they live in.

We found ourselves oscillating between the advantages and usefulness of these technological solutions ‘offered’ by profit-driven companies and our own urgencies to cultivate other modes of relating to technological processes and devices. With the rise of data collection and the increasing demands and regulations for web accessibility, we remain wary of how these two combined are used to mine and extract data that feeds back these companies' initial goal: the capitalisation of the users.

During the session, AI use came up in relation to time-intensive tasks such as the production of alt-text. The necessity for alt-text tends to catalyse institutional workers' anxiety regarding a consequential piling up of tasks in their already tight workflow.

This could be a good use of chatgpt

We were approached by a company to automatise these procedures and become more efficient

Powerpoint actually has an AI feature that writes the alt text for you

As we were discussing and uncomfortably testing out some chatgpt features, we wanted to figure out whether these models, which promote their efficiency, do really help when it comes to specific language-based tasks?

During the session, we tested Capito’s tool. Capito drew our attention, because it is a group that started working on accessible/simple language in 1999. They seem to have embraced the AI craze and created a tool to automate some of the labour they used to do. The results were, in some part, unsurprising and in another, unexpectedly weird.

The previous text rewritten by https://capito.eu

Rosa is a project that travels to different places. It offers a space for meetings, learning, and trying new things. The project is part of the A Traversal Network of Feminist Servers. The space has chocolates, candies, and a soft toy for celebrations. Rosa is more than just its hardware and software. It is also about the people who use it and the relationships they create. These relationships include the processes, emotions, and communities involved. The users are an important part of Rosa’s infrastructure. They perform actions that affect the technology and the people around them. Sharing Rosa involves passing it on to others. These relationships are important for understanding how Rosa works and how it can be improved.

What kind of button would your brain, neurodiverse or otherwise, like to exist? What gesture does your hand/other body part want to do to activate something (technologically)? What material do you find pleasant? What shape should such a button have? At what scale?

In March and June of 2024, we speculated and created prototypes of on and off buttons, within the framework of A Cane, sticky notes and another body. The workshop had a very wide spectrum of ways of creating, from soldering to sewing. We experimented with silicone casting, types of interactions, inflatables, textile and electronics. The material choices, with how they feel, were most apparent in the research. We left open the potential narratives around the button. Not only what they would look like but also what they could activate or deactivate was part of the speculation. In this zine you will find an arbitrary selection of the creations. In those still images we have tried to include the aspect of movement, of body gestures.

Thanks Alex, Marie, Raaf, Zsolt and all the wonderful participants/partakers of this workshop

-- Written by Imane B.K.

In the process of explaining and writing about the series of meetings called confusing coding situations which I organised and sometimes co-organised, I get lost in the difficult terms, trying to explain what and how and with whom it happens.

In the end, I am continuing to keep the long and confusing title even though it might not be helping. Some say that coding is hard, yet coding is something we do all of the time. Coding is defined as a set of instructions we write to a computer so it executes a certain task. This is a technique that is present in many other practices so, i have always been intrigued as to why computer coders and programmers are always seen as very unique people. It felt as if their job requires some specific skill or knowledge that is very difficult to acquire. While I do not want to delve deeper into why i find it weird how coding has become a highly appreciated thing in the mainstream, I do want to point at a specific thing i noticed in my own parcours in the coding realm that inspired me to take a critical look at coding: most things came down to being able to write instructions that the machine understands and ask the right questions to solve the equation at hand.

The other thing I wanted to bring forward is my wish to create a space that was a bit different than the typical hacking and coding spaces, which tend to be male dominated and very much focussed on progress (too unclear what you mean by progress), learning technical skills etc. Inspired by the people that joined the sessions, I have been trying to understand what coding mean for people that [who] say:

Yes I am a programmer but actually, I would really like to not be in front of the computer.

It took a while to start, mainly because I hoped to draw
in people with various backgrounds: curious people, programmers, people with no computer-related knowledge, people wanting to code with other people, knitters, theorists, artists activists, etc.
So, I wanted a soft start that wouldn't scare people off while not being too boring for those who had prior affinities with and knowledge of techno feminist practices
and coding.

1. Starting with HTML

After some tinkering in my mind, I was finally set on having a first session where we looked at practical coding skills when we did the html exercise where we looked at how to write code, from finding an IDE to writing the first html tags. What I enjoyed is hearing how the people who joined felt welcome and excited to continue. There were suggestions that helped stir the course of the coming sessions such as:

Today we took a very technical turn. Can we do more reflective stuff? Can we also read stuff, not only be hands on… Maybe read about the human experience of the internet?

I didn't understand everything but, it was nice to be here and so great that I finally got to use the terminal

2. Open working time

For the second session I made the decision to organise an open moment. The intention was to create a small pocket of time where people with different interests could come and share what they are busy with or simply join out of curiosity of what others might bring. The people in the mailing list seemed to be super interested in the vagueness of the sessions, and although the title of the sessions gave the impression that we were focussing on coding related projects, it didn't seem to shy people away from joining and doing everything but coding which I found very nice and refreshing.

The session could have taken many directions, especially since engagement and inspiration from the participants shouldn't be a given. But some brought a project to work on during the time and shared about it, others came with good energies, different curiosities and questions. The session ended up being a collective discussion on some topics around surveillance, security and the digital footprint. There was also a tangent on Palestine and activism which brought us to think with the necessity to boycott wix, a widely used zionist project.

Below you will find some links and resources that were shared in the moment:

• Zotero: open source tool to organize source materials: https://github.com/zotero/zotero
• Some links we looked at on surveillance:
  • Public surveillance cameras: http://www.insecam.org/
  • A collection of tools to help anarchists and other rebels understand the capabilities of their enemies, undermine surveillance efforts, and ultimately act without getting caught: https://www.notrace.how/
• Wix graveyard: https://nekrocemetery.anarchaserver.org/
• How to download a website and make it static: https://www.httrack.com/

3

After the open work time, The group hinted at having a session to focus on Palestine and the technologies that are complicit in the genocide in Gaza. I was happy to invite Sakinus to lead the reading session. This was a great way to experiment with the varying possibilities of the sessions as many were eager to read complicated texts together around technological entanglements.

4

For the fourth session I wanted to connect coding with crochet. I was mostly curious to see what it would mean for coders to apply the same logic of coding to a different technique such as crochet and pattern making. It served as an introduction to computational thinking via a hands-on activity. We ended up introducing the slime mold so as to move away from the binary approach of pattern making and coding.

5. Forever work in progress

The idea was to use some of our time to take a look at our relationship with work and time.

Starting from the feeling that being a coder produces symptoms correlating with productivist and solution-driven mindsets, the concept of crip time was introduced.

Crip time invites us to slow down, rethink what progress is, and honor the messy, non-linear nature of creation. We looked at what can resist the idea that productivity is the ultimate measure of value, reminding us that there is worth in the incomplete and the unresolved. This was part of a counter-narrative that questions the very culture of efficiency. The sessions brought forth questions on unionizing, organising and remembering different struggles through history.

Constant continues its series of artistic commissions this time in the context of “A cane, sticky notes, another body”. The commission format was created to make resources available for artists and researchers to develop their own body of work intersecting with the yearly theme.

For this commission, Constant invited Ahnjili ZhuParris. Ahnjili is a machine learning engineer, Ph.D. candidate, artist, and science communicator. Ahnjili’s artistic research and science communication efforts are dedicated to raising awareness about A.I. and algorithmic violence, which encompasses the violence that may arise from or be justified by automated decision-making systems. Ahnjili was joined by Alyssa Gersony, artist & vision rehabilitation therapist, Colette Aliman, sound designer and Dan Xu, user experience designer. They together set up the project called Screen-To-Soundscape and were joined by the co-creators Chris Alexandre, Bruno Defalque, Joris Verhulst, Raphael Bascour, Vincent Leone who gave advice and expertise on the user experience.

Screen-to-Soundscape adopts a creative and experimental approach to reimagining screen reader voices. The project aims to develop a speculative design prototype that transforms a browser or screen into an immersive soundscape. This prototype will feature multiple layered voices reading all readable text in unison with spatial audio enabling users to discern the text’s location within the browser. The motivation behind this initiative is to overcome the inherent limitations of traditional screen readers by offering users with visual impairments a more intuitive and immersive way to navigate digital content. This not only benefits users with visual impairments but also provides a richer, more engaging web experience for all users.

This project was supported by Constant, the Processing Foundation, and the Stimulerings Fonds.

The snippets gathered below are part of a documentation process that we practice in Constant, which we call ‘snowpoling’. Snowpoles are used in areas where significant amount of snow regularly fall. When paths disappear under a mass of snow,the snowpoles allow someone to still find their way. Similarly, we use a snowpole marker in lots of written text to find back a specific fragment.

During events, we write collectively on etherpad pages. A keyword is added whenever is written a phrase or paragraph that is relevant to a specific thematic. Through these keywords, the relevant bits of text can be grouped, and for example used in preparation of a publication, giving a glimpse into fragments of contrasting types of writing/thinking around a similar theme.

Below is a selection of fragments from the snowpoles: ++ableist-questioning-framework++ and ++Interdependencies++ which were used in the context of the worksession “A Cane, Sticky notes and Another body”, December 2024 in the Museum Dr. Guislain.

An afternoon of public presentations

In the afternoon of Saturday 7th of December 2024, the participants at the worksession A Cane, Sticky notes, Another Body shared, between themselves and with some visitors, the ideas that popped up during a week of closely working, eating, getting frustreted, thinking, relaxing, feeling uncofortable and laughing together. These ideas took different forms.

alternate access

Image descriptions, also known as alt-text, help blind people and people with visual impairments to access images and other visual content. They are one of the most known code-based accessibility technology, thanks to the work of institutional standard organisations such as W3C's WACG, but also thanks to the efforts of communities inhabiting text-based social media.

Even though it is now associated with visually impaired folks and screen-readers, it has not been developed with disabilities in mind. In fact, it is an old legacy function made available since the early stages of HTML, when the support for images was added to web pages in 1992. At the outset, its purpose was related to the fact that the newly supported images would not be accessible to some users with different equipment. While computers with graphical user interfaces and visual browsers were becoming common, many users still used a text-based interface and text-based browser. The newer <img> tag was then designed to include an “alt” attribute for older browsers without image support, offering an alternate rendition of the same element.

It is not a coincidence that it was a system developed to keep a diverse technological ecosystem (extending a feature to older text-based browsers) that turned out to provide the means to widen access to millions of blind and visually impaired folks. And alt-text is still useful for overcoming other access barriers too, for example in areas with poor internet coverage it allows to alternatively read images that would otherwise take ages to load. They are completely different issues of access, but doing things with a care for and awareness of an exclusion can have outcomes that go beyond the initial aim, offering a useful means to tackle other exclusions later on.

care routines

For the past 18 years Constant has been using SPIP for its website. While alt-text attributes are well supported in SPIP, during our last website redevelopment, 7 years ago, we did not pay attention to these textual descriptions. As in 2024 we started the process to develop our new website, we realized this lack and we agreed on making accessibility a priority from the beginning. Alt-text is one of the easiest first steps to take, so without waiting for the new website, it was relatively quick to fix the templates and add correct alt-text support in the current SPIP website.

Still, at the time of writing this text, a quick look at the source code of our homepage revealed that most of the images attached to our newer articles did not have an alt-text attached. Even after the discussions and the decisions. Why? Partly, because it is one more step in the flow of making articles appear on a website every month, a flow we sometimes struggle to find space-time for. To enable a new form of collective attention, you need to think where to place this task in-between the many steps that are involved in meaning-making. While writing this text, it was easy to find where to place alt-text writing from now on, in a structural way. In our bi-weekly meetings, one recurring task we check in with each other are the translations of the articles for our newsletter (we work in three languages, English, Dutch and French, but not everyone speaks them fluently). The task of translation is assigned at one line of the meeting's etherpad, so adding an “Alt-text check” next to the “Translation check” will make it happen from now on.

This is a pretty trivial way to place a form of care in the everyday practices, and there are many different approaches. If the one described above is more “organizational”, other approaches available are more “technical”. For example, Wagtail, the free and open-source CMS we are working with to develop our new website, pays particular attention to accessibility issues, for example signaling all images that do not provide alternative text rendition to the editor.

alt-text as work…

Writing alt-text is care and it is work, and it is important to reflect on how we relate to this type of work that has the effect of widening access. From the disability justice movement (https://circulations.constantvzw.org/2024/drempel/reader/2-physical-spaces-building-access/funambulist-disordinary-architecture.pdf) we learn that it is fundamental to understand this work as something that enriches our practice and the significance we try to put in it, rather than a daunting task to add to the to-do pile. Seeing it as a boring task that will use up limited resources is an ableist relation to what one does, and a missed opportunity for opening another channel of meaning-making.

As in all other contexts, when we deal with accessibility, when we talk about work and limited time/resources, we will inevitably be solicited with technological solutions to tackle some of the work. It is quite a layered question, and following alt-text as a track, we get a sharp but nuanced cut through these layers.

There are plenty of so-called “AI solutions” available, such as the ones that Microsoft and other GAFAMs have built-in to automate alt-texts in their aquariums. Preparing presentations in Office 365 you will be offered a one-click solution to add automated alternate descriptions to your slides, and Meta's platforms are fully alt-texting images for you “automagically”. Ironically, the same companies that are actively limiting access to their platforms due to their economical model (not seeing content without accounts, freemium models, mass advertising with its visual overload, etc.), also seem to champion some forms of accessibility. When we choose to refuse their services, because we refuse to depend on extractive, ecocidal, fascist-leaning platforms such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta, we still remain with the open question of possibly automated accessibility features.

In fact, this question appears outside of corporate gated communities, too. On the federated social media network Mastodon, both the network's user base and its software developers are more attentive to accessibility questions than on its corporate counterparts. It is refreshing to see how the question is approached on such a de-centralized platform: different methods are proposed, more than one way is available. Regarding alt-texts, we can consider the example of two user-developed “bots” to deal with undescribed images, with different degrees of automation. If you choose to follow the alt-text reminder, developed by @pup_hime, this bot will privately notify you when you post an image forgetting to add an alt-text. In the same situation, instead, the Altbot by Micr0byte will use Google's Gemini image recognition capabilities to reply in public with an automated description of the un-described image.

Choosing between two bots seems an easy choice of how one decides to go about alt-text, but once again it is not a binary question, in reality there will be many situations where you want to use just some automated alt-text. In our case, while we can write alt-text for newly added pictures, in Constant's 17-year archive of past activities most images would still be without description. It is very unlikely we will have the time to go and do this work, so nuanced in-between solutions are to be considered, for example writing them where they would be most needed, or generating the description with a less-rotten image recognition model. But the question of work would not disappear, it would just hide deeper.

…and as heteromation

Automated alt-text is still work, even though a different type of work. The image recognition tools that generate these descriptions have all been developed by “training” models on a dataset of annotated images. Each image in the model has a corresponding description, and by millions of repeated correlations these models will extract the association of a certain pixel-shape to a certain set of words. This is the extracted work of millions of descriptions, of various kinds and from various sources. But who has done the work of annotating millions and millions of pictures? We found a very insightful analysis of one such image dataset in Christo Buschek and Jer Thorpd's text “Models all the way down”.

In a fascinating close-circuit, we find out that the annotations that come associated with the massive image collections are in fact “scraped” from existing alt-texts on the web. In the image dataset LAION-5B, one of the most common datasets used by image recognition models to distil from millions of image-text pairs, these are some of the sources of those alt-texts:

• SlidePlayer allows users to upload their PowerPoint slides, so it will attach ALT text to images based on the text that users wrote in the slides.
• Pinterest prompts its users to write ALT tags before they ‘pin’ their images, as these become the captions for the images, too.
• Shopify users often have their eyes on high Google PageRank scores, so they will write ALT tag descriptions with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in mind.
• All of this means that ALT tags are not so much descriptions of image contents as they are artifacts of the web’s workings and of creators’ retail ambitions.

Researchers Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi have proposed the word heteromation to describe this seemingly magic relation to the work that happens in other moments and in places we do not see. It is good to keep in mind how what work will be mobilized to produce the alt-text: the distilled efforts of all those annotators, their biases, the different extractive logics involved will be virtually called in in every text generation.

alt-text as meaning-making

It is worth making a conscious decision, trying to be realistic with what is the work that we choose to dedicate to, while keeping a radical understanding of how our resources are invested. One needs to refuse the scarcity framework of ableism that treats access questions as ‘extra work’, and at the same time one needs to deal with capitalist time that is organizing everyone's practices. DIY solutions are always an option, but they might only get so far, in many cases automation will add a basic layer of access that would not be there otherwise.

From the point of view of Constant, a structurally funded cultural and artistic organization, we chose to do the future work without mobilizing so-called AI, in the same way as we write and translate articles without delegating them to be written by a Large Language Model. As the core of our publicly funded work is caring for our relation to the world and for the meaning that circulates through our activities and publications, we choose not to have that meaning be organized by something so intertwined with extractive practices. We now consider alt-text writing as an integral part of our work, that is in relation with the surrounding text, the image and the rest of what is published. And this relation is alive and multiplies meaning in all directions.

An amazing and inspiring example of the effects that this type of care can have, can be seen in the movie Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims by Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, a beautiful critical work revolving around Lithium extraction in the Atacama desert of Chile. The movie proposes a special form of closed-captioning for its whole duration: apart from the subtitles to the spoken word, the music and sounds heard are described in another part of the screen, adding an additional layer throughout the whole movie. The concise poetic attention that was paid to these descriptions has an effect beyond the one of making the work accessible for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. That careful form of writing and interpreting is shared with every viewer, adding just another layer to this brilliant movie.

This is a print of the collective agenda for the shared space that we keep between the artists working in the studio building CDJ388. The space is for mixed usage, sometimes research and production for diverse artistic projects, sometimes workshops for invited people, sometimes modest public moments.

During the last months of 2024, renovations took place in the shared studio building. For accessibility reasons, some adaptations were made to the downstairs space that is used as a collective space. These are some elements that were added / altered.

Support grip in downstairs toilet
It is a big help to have some extra grip next to the toilet. This one is stable and anchored in the wall.

Stairs, added handrail
The top floor is not wheelchair accessible, there is a staircase, but no elevator. The stairs had a handrail on the open side, but not on the side of the wall. To give more grip and extra support for people who need it, a railing was added on the side of the wall.

Basement cover
This turning piece of wood is a very basic solution for upkeeping the cover to the basement. The wooden cover on the stairs to the basement opens until vertical, and can then be locked in place by turning the small woodblock in front of it. It is nice to see that the builders found inventive solutions. Before it was difficult to enter the basement due to the heavy cover that was there, which had no hinges, but now we can more easily enter.

Fold down armrest
Some years ago, this armrest was recuperated from Kaaitheater which went into long term renovations, by In-Limbo, a platform that aims to facilitate the donation and reuse of materials within the socio-cultural sector in Brussels. (https://www.inlimbo.brussels) Two years ago we got it from them, and we tried installing it a few times, but it never worked. Now, finally it found its way to the renewed toilet.

Metal grid over outdoor corridor
A large grid was installed over the very uneven cobblestones of the outdoor passway, to offer better access for people using a wheelchair.

Threshold at the entrance
The metal grid is also a slow slope towards the main entrance of the building. The 20cm step that was there before is now gone.

Threshold to the garden
The doors opening to the garden have quite a high threshold. Outside a permanent ramp has been installed, which is made from the same metal as the sloping ramp towards the entrance of the building. But on the inside of the garden door there is no permanent ramp installed. Instead, a mobile ramp is available. But putting this when someone needs it remains an obstacle.

The feedback pool is a team of three persons invited each year to pay close attention to Constant on multiple levels. To think with us our institutional modes and internal workings. To review our programme of activities and reflect on the specific research topic of the ongoing year. And to see how this all sit in relation to our mission and our initial intentions.

The 2024 feedback pool members, Ren L Britton, An Vandermeulen and Tunde Adefioye, highlighted each in their own way some of the things Constant struggled with institutionally speaking; and especially throughout this past year. They notably told us “inclusivity and diversity frameworks aren't enough, you have to shift towards abolition & complicity”. This strong and explicit recommendation makes us pause, wondering what abolition and complicity would mean for Constant, what shape would it take and what would need to happen to shift in this direction? What follows is a slightly artificial construction in which edited quotes from the feedback pool (in bold) were selected out of the long recorded conversations. Later on, the team members were invited to write a response/reaction to one of the quotes.

You can use the institution as a tool, to make certain things possible which normally aren't, to counter injustices. Finding your spot in the grey zone of the grey zone. Let's think about a hammer, you can hammer nails into planks to make a table but you can also use a hammer to smash a window. It feels important to define what we'd want this tool that is Constant to be used for; so that we also have a common understanding of its limits.

If you want to act against injustices, you cannot rely on the legal framework. And even so, governments have repeatedly been doing crimes within the legal frameworks they have themselves set up. So why shouldn't art institutions do crimes? What we do can't only be about art, for instance we got to know about labour laws, about internal security measures etc. as an individual as well as an institution, doing crime becomes needed in face of a justice system being so deeply unjust. helping out an undocumented person, the obvious right thing to do, is also often a crime. so you do crime. the problem as an institution, though, as a complex and faceted entity, is the political question of where you draw the line collectively, when it is right to disobey the law. like a real political question, you will have different answers even within the people that you work with, that frequent your activities, and read your publications. related, the question of how transparently you do so and speak about that, will produce even more disagreements. as the current european political climate is slowly becoming a bleak one, going towards a tightening of the right-wing ranks, and you start seeing soft silencing of dissident voices, being outspoken about doing crime might not always be the right move. so we need to be ready to go under, to develop modes of trust and of opacity and of solidarity that are not fully readable. I think there is a lot to learn from the work done in academia and education along the undercommons proposal, formulated by Moten and Harvey. there is still a lot to be done to understand how that translates into the arts, that has a similar but different visibility imperative.. and i agree it is an urgent question :)

Being formally part of an institution can also be tricky because you have to accept being in the position of setting up your ‘solidarity frame’, like how and who you're going to help and support thanks to your institutional privilege. It might be difficult but I don’t find it weird. It is a privilege, and it reminds me that the word privilege stands for positive fortune. We are lucky to do this. It also reminds me of the way my dad used to talk to me as a child about privilege, himself coming from a lower working class background, he used the word to talk about how fortunate we were to for example be able to go on a holiday together as a family. That it is important to take a moment and understand it when you know you are lucky. – So as an institution we set up our solidarity framework, and we don’t forget that we are fortunate to be part of such a thing, and in that way don't take it lightly. Potentially difficult work, yes, but not weird.

The funding systems that were set up within arts and culture are quite incompatible with undoing white supremacy. Any oppressive regime breeds its own oppositions and these can be of many types. The work we do with Constant is oppositional in that it aligns with mutual support and solidarity. It is a slow but persistent work to erode oppressions, hollow them out, make them less dominant. It is true we probably will ‘undo them’ as in: making them completely disappear. I think ‘shifting out of gear’ with white supremacist and other patriarcho-capitalist regimes is important. Within arts and culture we can create spaces of empowerment, experiment and discovery that are absorbing harm, and offer relief, rest, recuperation, resilience and resistance. There is militancy in queering calculation, language, togetherness, computation, organising and being, and there is pleasure and ‘undoing’ in tuning in with registers of collectivity and support.

Next to the feedback pool, we were guided and advised by Stephanie Collingwoode Williams during internal sessions we called Conflicts with an attitude. At the end of these sessions, Stephanie showed us the fifteen characteristics of white supremacy culture and told us how much they're pervasive in our institutional modes. We've decided to keep them with us; one feedback pool member even explained that they printed them during their first day on the job. Another one said:

If we take white supremacist, ableist culture as being the basis of how we move through the world, the amount of things that one has to undo in order to be able to step out of that is A LOT. There's a lot of operations that need to happen for it to be the case.

We've decided to keep them present and visible, maybe it's our gentle way of inviting you to do the same?

Last but not least

We would like to express our gratitude to everyone who took part in this process.

During this year around accessibility, in which we have learnt so much but in which we also came up against limits, thresholds, frustrations, things impossible to achieve (on a short term), trials and errors, we were very lucky, as usual, to be surrounded by many smart, lovely and caring people.

Thank you to (listed very randomly):

Sévérine, Femke, Laurence C., Sarah M., Peggy, Denis, Nadia, Al, Anita, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Tina, Pierre C., Hans, Pierre De J., Ot, An M., Claire, Tundé, Rafaella,Winz, Giulietta, Miriyam, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles Arts Numériques, Angeliki, Wouter, Pieter-Paul, Valérie,Sakina, Alix, Alice N., Annee, Agnes V., Julie, Jimé, Diego, Innoviris, Sarrita, Flo, Seda, Liesbeth, Ana, Sina, Wouter, Appa, Just for the record, Mo, Vlaamse Overheid, Reni, Rachel, Axel, Daniel, Nicolas, Michael, Kris, Pierre H., Marius, Sarah I., Laurent, Maximiliaan, Leonard, Greg, Thomas, Florence, Hélène, Alexander, ooooo, Ronan (Harry Studio), Quentin, Martin, Julie & Léa (Studio Purple), Charlotte L., Arnould, RABBKO, Stéphanie, Agnes Q., Jessica, Mara, Lars, Nona, Helena, Maria, Olga, Kristine, Yoon He, Sarah, Felicie, Loraine, Maxime, Ahnjili, Alyssa, Dan, Alice G., Ava, Kamo, Simone, Sakinus, Norbert, OKO, Lorenzo, Lula, Menko, Niek, Shaan, Gülce, Juliàn, Sofia, Maribel Josefien, Ren, An V., Cato, Charlotte G., Sarah G., Maxigas,Tom, Vivien, Nubo, Marielle, Eugénie, Rita, Loes, An G., Teresa, Phyllis, Giorgi, Louisa, Cassandra, Jara, Marie, Cristina, Sakina, Helen, Raaf, Linde, Angeliki, Alex, Anna, Noah, Karl, Ludivine, Hypolite, Arthur, Jen, Laura, Doriane, Clara, Stéphanie, TacTic, Julia, Harry, Christel, Otis

Process and Tools

This publication was made collectively using etherpad, paged.js and lots of php/css/js. We were energised by tea and coffee, good vegetables, eggs, cookies and tangerines at Constant's office and studio in Brussels. The making and finalising of this zine was facilitated by Sarah Garcin.

Fonts

Lunchtype is a contemporary lunch-time design experiment designed by Stefan Wetterstrand under SIL Open Font License, 1.1. A classic sans-serif typography, making it easy to read for people with dyslexia or other reading difficulties. Text formatting follows accessibility principles (fairly large typeface, wide line-height, no text justification). Lunch type was found on the amazing https://usemodify.com/ website.

Publi Fluor is a font designed by Speculoos/Open Source Publishing in 2011 (named Crickx) and republished in 2024 by the Crickx research group with the addition of post-binary glyphs on the Bye Bye Binary foundry under Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r).
Publi Fluor was the store where self-taught artist Chrystel Crickx sold hand-cut vinyl letters for signage and advertising purposes between 1975 and 2000.

Ouvrières is an inclusive font by Laure Azizi distributed by Bye Bye Binary under the CUTE license.

Printing

If you're lucky enough to hold the RISO edition in your hands, it's been printed at chez Rosi in Brussels (big thanks to them). If not, you're on your own and have printed your own edition at home (bravo!).

Licence

All the work is licenced under the Collective Conditions for re-use license (CC4r).

The licence text mentions: “The invitation to re-use applies as long as you, as the FUTURE AUTHOR are convinced that your re-use does not contribute to oppressive arrangements of power, privilege and difference. These may be reasons to refrain from release and re-use.” The license addresses conditions of solidarity and collectivity, states of being that we hope would orient your re-use of this booklet.

Funding

Even if money is not everything, it means a lot to be able to support many artists,vresearchers and collectives with meetings, workshops, commissions, and more.

Constant is supported by Vlaamse Overheid, Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie and Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles - Loterie Nationale

Until next year!

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Wendy, Peter, Mia, Martino, Imane, Donatella, Elodie