This is our submission for the “INTENSE INTERIORS – 2023 Architecture and Film Symposium”. It was hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School’s Interior Design department on May 6 & 7, 2023. Our piece is in the form of an experimental audio paper.

“Outlook - A Multisensory Installation” explores the concept of mental mapping: a term blind people use that defines the ability to picture or imagine things in the world around us or us and where we are located in a space. Throughout the experimental audio paper, we explore the idea that the visual isn’t the only best way of getting a clear picture of where we are in space, that tactile maps are one way of understanding an interior and out into the exterior world.

The audio paper was presented alongside an in house installation including tactile maps, accessible Purdys braille box of chocolates with legend, iPhone for touch screen demonstration, and 3D printed models during the symposium on May 7, 2023.

It was an honour to be included in this symposium, to share our perspectives as two blind Canadians.

Thanks to co-chairs: Lorella Di Cintio, PhD and Vahid Vahdat, PhD.

Learn more about “INTENSE INTERIORS – 2023 Architecture and Film Symposium” here:

http://architectureandfilm.org

Credits:

Joanne Beckford speaking the name of the exhibit, Penny Mary LeclairBennett (Outlook 2021-06-28 - Deafblind Awareness Month with Penny Leclair), Mitch Creedy (Outlook 2022-11-14 - Blindness and Gender Intersecting with First-Time Guest Mitch Creedy), and Patricia Elgersma (Outlook 2020-10-05 - Perfect Pitch and Mental Mapping with Guest Patricia Elgersma).

Thanks to the companies who contributed to our installation:

https://www.purdys.com

https://see3d.org

https://ailledesign.com

Image description: Kerry and Brian are standing behind a tall podium as part of their exhibit showcasing their tactile maps. Brian is wearing a charcoal grey pinstriped collar dress shirt and Kerry is wearing the Aille Design braille blue dress with white braille beading. Kerry is holding in her hands a box of Purdys Chocolates that has accessible braille packaging.

National AccessAbility Week takes place from May 28 to June 3, 2023 . This year the theme for National AccessAbility Week is “Disability Inclusion: From Possibilities to Practice”.

This week on Outlook we’re speaking with returning guest and friend of the show Christine Malec, about what else? Accessibility.

Accessibility and the arts and culture. It’s time for Luminato!

Specifically, we’re speaking to Christine about this year’s Luminato Festival, taking place from June 7 through June 18, 2023. We discuss her role in the festivities and fun, what she’s learned about herself regarding features of this year’s festival such as puppetry and dance, and on what is gained by putting herself out there to play music for passersby in the Toronto subway system.

It’s always great to find out what Christine Malec is up to. So check out more about this year’s Luminato festival here:

https://luminatofestival.com

Don’t forget to tune in to Radio LUMI online during the festival where you can hear programs hosted by Malec and others:

https://luminatofestival.com/event/radio-lumi/

Listen to the most recent episode in the Radio LUMI podcast series featuring Malec:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1793756/12912775-podcast-episode-4-joy

And support Christine on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/ChristineMalec

It’s been a wild May month so far for Outlook and we were off doing some cool things earlier in it.

This week on the podcast, we share the details of our May weekend in Toronto as a part of the Architecture & Film Symposium, 2023, which took place on May 6th and 7th, hosted by Toronto Metropolitan University Creative School’s Interior Design department. The theme this year was Intense Interiors and our exhibit was titled Outlook - A Multi-Sensory Installation, all based around the concept of mental mapping, a way of understanding and navigating one’s surroundings and of spacial awareness for blind people. And, in our exhibit, we displayed a number of tactile maps of interiors and exterior city layouts, a box of inclusive and accessible mixed chocolates with a braille legend to help demonstrate the point of our Outlook installation, along with a number of 3D objects and other materials explaining the real life lived experience of blindness, with a focus on other sensory modalities for understanding the world around us, to counteract the misconceptions of blindness which can be found in one of this event’s supplemental films: Blindness, 2008 (book authored by Jose Saramago).

In this episode, we describe how we traveled to and within Toronto for the weekend and how we navigated the hotel and other accessibility features such as braille on doors and in hotel elevators, our Friday night spent with the founder and assistant of accessible braille fashion company Aille Design after Kerry decided to rent the Blue Braille Dress, a bit about some of the keynote presenters and panels on the Saturday at The Ace Hotel, and about our installation and discussions we had with interested parties who stopped by to find out more about us and our maps and other assorted accessible items; along with the showcasing of inclusive companies such as Aille Design, Purdys Chocolatier, and See3D.

Thanks to the co-chairs of the symposium: Lorella Di Cintio, PhD and Vahid Vahdat, PhD.

This event was a year in the making, a few times remnants of Covid made us think it wouldn’t actually happen, and we were so glad to be in attendance. We finish off this week finally airing the audio paper we initially submitted for consideration in this year’s proceedings to wrap up this one. (We will be posting the audio paper (nearly 10 minutes in length, as its own segment in this podcast feed in the coming weeks.)

So for more on the symposium, check out the link below:

http://architectureandfilm.org

And make sure to check out and support the companies who graciously contributed to our installation:

https://ailledesign.com

https://www.purdys.com

https://see3d.org

It’s a new day, it’s a May day, and we’re back for another Outlook Mixed Bag episode.

This week we’re finally getting to it, explaining a project we’ve had in the works for nearly an entire year now, but first we share a sudden loss in our family and on our own special memories of our uncle Mike who passed away, unexpectedly last week, moments after doing the thing he loved: playing music live with friends.

The much hinted at project is our participation in a symposium taking place on May 6th and 7th in Toronto: Intense Interiors.

Ours is Outlook - A Multi-Sensory Installation where we’re exploring mental mapping using multiple sensory modalities to show a range of perspectives, along with clips from guests appearing on this show.

We’re showcasing a range of accessible products including braille fashion and mixed chocolates and tactile and 3D printed maps and objects.

We discuss this last year and how we became a part of Intense Interiors, we give a demonstration of the symposium’s organizer saying her own name on the website the symposium is using where you can record yourself saying your name so others can hear how it’s properly pronounced, and we tell what it’s been like developing our installation, beginning with the audio paper we produced to illustrate the ideas demonstrated within.

Check out this site and record your name which you can add to your email signatures so others will know its proper pronunciation in any situation:

https://namedrop.io/

And to learn more about the symposium, go to:

https://architectureandfilm.org/

Mike Kijewski: 1952-2023

Well we made it!

This week Outlook celebrates our 200th episode and we’re doing it with a special guest, with an interview/discussion on the issues which are central to what we do here: accessibility, advocacy, equality.

This week we welcome the first person to really discover our show back in early 2019 when he first reached out to us, our very first phone guest.

Anthony Hodgetts from Alberta joins us as we reflect on 200 shows and we learn a bit more about one of the hosts of fellow radio show Bumping Into Walls. Anthony tells us about the bus adventures he goes on to travel from his home in Calgary to visit relatives in Alberta’s capitol city of Edmonton and co-host Kerry shares about once being left behind when attempting to take a bus home from Toronto.

Anthony tells us about the SCORE computer camp he attended here in Ontario, put on for teens by the CNIB, something hosts Brian and Kerry never experienced even living in the province. He shares how he discovered Outlook, a little about his own show which is in the works again on university and community station CJSW, and related is the subject of how to find guests for shows like ours.

Hodgetts was given oxygen at birth which caused his blindness and tells us about being integrated into the mainstream school in the 70’s and still being segregated in a classroom for students with disabilities (separate but equal as they say) for the first several years of school and then being thrown out into a regular classroom in the later grades. He tells us about the skills he acquired early on (braille and orientation and mobility) and his experience of feeling on display to the sighted kids when finally included among them.

We discuss how heavy manual braillers were, cupboards to the head and chairs in the way, and about Anthony’s feelings on guide dogs (we all agree that women seem to like a guy with a cute dog), as he explains the types of transportation he uses in his province as well as the reactions drivers have to blind riders. We get into comparing assistive device and accessible equipment support programs between provinces, a little on Anthony’s work as an accessibility tester, and we finish off hearing about his interest in a number of hobbies: bowling, choir, and being a member of the Lions club.

Happy Birthday to guest (co)host) Anthony Hodgetts and Happy 200th episode to us!

You can find episodes of the radio show/podcast Bumping Into Walls here:

https://cjsw.com/program/bumping-into-walls/

(also available wherever you get your podcasts)

“If you rely on you're eyes only, you’re gonna miss a lot,” says Donna Hudon who, at age six was wearing glasses and at eleven she was using a cane at night. And by age twenty-three this guest was totally blind. Nights and days, she now has issues with her circadian rhythms like some other blind people (known as non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder), impacting the sleep-wake cycle which makes night shifts doable for her.

This week on Outlook we’re speaking with Donna, a personal care worker from Nanaimo, British Columbia, out there on Vancouver Island. She’s one of only a handful of blind people around doing personal care work and advocating, simply by doing this work, for more to follow in her footsteps.

Growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, we discuss the role Hudon’s sisters played, in the early years of Donna’s blindness, to get their mother to treat Donna like any other child and the influence this had on the trajectory of Donna’s life.

She’s wanted to work taking care of others and children with disabilities of all kinds for a long time. Even with a rehabilitation practitioner diploma and a degree in child and youth care,

Donna still had to push to get hired anywhere because employers wouldn’t look beyond the blindness. In the end, however, a little word like “no” never did slow this woman down. And now the Nanaimo Association for Community Living, where she works, is creating policies in their procedure manual: how to have somebody with a disability work to being an independent worker.

As she shares with us about her life looking for jobs, raising and homeschooling two children of her own, along with volunteering and being an active member out in her community, Donna shows why it’s important for those of us with disabilities to be tenacious in carving out a space for ourselves - in employment like in the rest of life.

And speaking of night shifts: Donna was just coming off of one of those, a twelve hour shift, to be with us this week, but after facing breast cancer a few years ago, not to mention all the discrimination she’s been up against when trying to contribute to her community and to the broader society all these years, she also likes to get away from all of that sometimes. So we finish off the show hearing about her favourite pastime…her kayak out on the ocean and being on a competitive cancer survivors dragon boat team because nothing slows Donna Hudon down for very long.

For more info on her work experiences, check out this article: "Blazing New Trails Takes Persistence: My Job as a Personal Support Worker" from the November 2019 issue of The Blind Canadian:

https://www.cfb.ca/november-2019-version-of-the-blind-canadian?id=2

On January 4, 2023 something new was revealed; the World Blind Herald went live, choosing that date because that is Louis Braille’s birthday. This week on Outlook we speak with its founder, publisher, and editor in chief Chris Hofstader.

We begin with Chris sharing about his life including the early days when he was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) as a child, sharing all the things he was into just like all the other boys. He also shares his time as the vocalist in a punk rock band, lining up stories of his youth with the early, unknown years of the AIDS crisis in New York. From punk to computer sciences, the first half of this week’s Outlook Chris leads us through the years when his RP continued, he searched to find his place in the working and blindness world, seeing adaptive technology evolved from its earliest days.

With his background in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics) , writing was a natural next step for Chris who, on the second half of the show, tells us about some of the topics and articles published on WBH since its inception and prototype days through to its publication at the beginning of the year. On the World Blind Herald’s site, find weekly Blindness Briefs with news stories about what blind people are up too all over, featured stories and other resources provided by blind people of all types, and a list of impressive bios of all those advisors and contributing writers on the team and involved in the project in some way.

And we can’t complete this conversation without hearing from our guest about the policy of WBH on politics, specifically blindness politics which is something we’ve experienced ourselves since getting involved in advocacy in our thirties. Editor in chief Chris Hofstader is with us, sharing the publication’s mission, which is to include as many diverse perspectives from blind people globally; this being Outlook’s main mission as well.

Things like sports, advocacy, business, and crime are just some of the topics you can find. So go here to check out the World Blind Herald and give them a read because they want to support the space for other blind creators and entrepreneurers as they’re just getting started publishing the perspectives of as many blind people as possible:

https://www.worldblindherald.com/

And, if you’re blind, consider advertising with them or writing for them.

REMEMBER THIs, Jan Karski: “Humans have infinite capacity to ignore things that are not convenient”.

We’re back for our final week of Women’s History Month, with another mixed bag show.

We wrap up March with a bit of a look back for co-host Kerry’s recent discussion of feeling the stigma of finishing her education late and feeling behind everyone. And reviewing the guests (Rebecca Singh and Daniella Mestyanek Young) who joined us in the first half of the month.

But while the quote above was said by a Polish-Catholic man, who found himself in an extreme circumstance and who worked in the underground to warn the world about what the Nazis were doing to the Jews of Europe/specifically in Poland, discrimination anywhere, of any kind can grow if enough people look the other way.

the local headline in London, Ontario when advocates and riders are pushing City Counsel to do more to improve paratransit:

“Paratransit fails to get some disabled Londoners to meeting about fixing dysfunctional system”, Daryl Newcombe, CTV News, March 6

Isn’t that just horribly hysterical?

We discuss what paratransit is and a little about our own experiences using it in the past and about some of the resistance the counsel has been showing during the process, but there’s got to be a way and we will share more updates on that in the weeks ahead.

We also hear from Kerry’s new phone. Listen to see if you can catch it, along with some signature sibling bickering thrown in there. Also, talk co-host Brian’s early instrument practice on the trumpet comes up plus Kerry’s clarinet too. And about Brian’s draft night/season of fantasy baseball starting on his birthday here, he shares about the strangeness of being into a hubby others are not; though the earlier quote was from World War II, this draft is about sports, not war.

So check out our mixed bag of topical goodies here, last but not least ending the show with a tribute to disability activist Judy Heumann (rest in peace), as we wave goodbye to March.

Find the documentary Crip Camp featuring Heumann with audio description here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFS8SpwioZ4

Listen to our past Outlook episode to hear our thoughts on the doc:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outlook-2020-04-20-crip-camp/id1527876739?i=1000488226660

Our episode reviewing Heumann’s book:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/outlook-2020-07-13-being-heumann-book-review/id1527876739?i=1000488226662

And the article about paratransit mentioned above can be read in full here:

https://london.ctvnews.ca/paratransit-fails-to-get-some-disabled-londoners-to-meeting-about-fixing-dysfunctional-system-1.6301807

In our present world, of capitalism and productivity so valued, this week’s Outlook is about Kerry’s journey. While it’s still Women’s History Month for one more week, this time Brian interviews Kerry on some big changes in her life. It is time to share the incredibly winding path which led her here.

From talk of Kerry’s rather ordinary early education to the onset of her kidney failure years in the midst of puberty, this time Kerry wants to explain some things like why high school was so isolating for her and the twenty year journey to get to the end of it, to catch up with herself.

Many people have not finished their education including those in our own family we love, and so why is it so hard, has it been this hard for Kerry to talk about the education she didn’t get? Why do we put such immense pressure on ourselves to be everything and to finish what we start and to keep doing more more more?

Disability and illness are only a few of the things that make up Kerry’s story and yet she’s been afraid to openly discuss her perceived failures until this moment and she’s not alone in fearing the stigma of being without a diploma.

Outlook is about perspective, with what got us all ours, no matter how long it took to get there.

“As Kerry’s brother Brian, I’ve been there over the years during her ups and downs and couldn’t be more proud of who she is today. Her brand new website is an example of her many achievements and you can find it here”:

https://kayconsulting.ca

And check out this guest blog post Kerry wrote back in 2015, with a slightly different perspective of the times, which also provided inspiration for the title of this episode:

https://hastywords.com/2015/08/27/bereal-kerry-kijewski/

We decided to call this special International Women’s Day/Women’s History Month episode of Outlook “Us and Them”, a slight altering from the term us vs them, relating to a chapter in the memoir we’re featuring with this interview Kerry did for a gender studies course she recently took.

“Uncultured” is a book by Daniella Mestyanek Young, a writer and scholar who’s studied organizational psychology and group dynamics, specializing in extreme groups. We wanted to put out this show to show that Outlook is about disability, but that it’s bigger than this one single intersectionality we share about and how systems are held together to serve the majority, leaving out the needs and rights of the minority.

The book is about the cult Daniella was born into, the most notorious religious sex cult in the world called The Children of God, but in this discussion she speaks mostly about how she then fled that and joined the US military and the extreme sexism she found waiting for her in the army.

Mestyanek Young explains the things she expected when joining the military and the things which surprised her. She talks to Kerry about a particular vest that was designed to stop bullets but of which was not designed to save the lives of all its wearers equally, and about her meeting with President Obama and the biases he himself held upon their meeting.

Identity. Toxicity. Trauma. This “agent of change” did her part to improve the experience of women in the army, in regulation and in culture, in a place where structure is key and rigid systems harm those who don’t fit the mold. And now her book is making a difference in how we stand up against harmful institutions where change is badly needed. Humans have always needed each other, safety in numbers with a group being protection, but Daniella wasn’t only under threat in war on the battle field. She was under threat every day from the harmful sexism rampant in the male dominated military world she was in, hearing from the very beginning that she should expect to get raped at some point by a fellow soldier because that’s just how it was in the army.

This scholar of extreme group behaviours tells us why there’s no us without a them and vice versa. Kerry read Uncultured and highly recommends it. You don’t have to have been in the military or in a religious cult for that matter to see yourself in its pages. Buy the memoir at this link:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/uncultured-a-memoir-daniella-mestyanek-young/17856062

And for more on Daniella and the book:

https://www.uncultureyourself.com