Gotta update my Disability Pride Dreamsheep icon...

[soc_puppet]

Back from the con, and I just wanted to share a few quick Accessibility Department victory moment things:

1) Lots of people being totally jazzed about the services we offer, particularly the Accessibility Pass and the ability to take a person of your choice with you to skip lines (though also lots of people only just learning about said pass, which means I need to do a better job of advertising)

2) A "Cosplay For Spoonies" panel! It had some really good advice in general, and some that I am definitely going to steal for future Accessibility Department stuff

3) Okay, tonight, when we were basically all packed up and the pizza had just shown up for our "Thank god the con is over and we survived, yay!" party? One of my fellow staffers told me about a conversation he had with someone else, who was not only delighted by everything that AnimeIowa was doing to be accessible, but was planning on taking the evidence of our con being accessible to a rival con and tearing strips off their concom/convention executives/the people in charge of it for not being nearly as good and I just. For a department of two people, with the person in charge being completely self-trained and often having eir butt kicked by executive dysfunction... Yeah. I definitely did a tiny little victory dance.

I am sooooooo looking forward to making things even better next year ♥

Comments

[gwydion]

Fighting the good fight!

[alexseanchai]

EXCELLENT

Venting here because I don't want to call out a favorite activist organization on Tumblr

[capri0mni]

Hooray! I'm so proud of you.

Re: that reply I made on Tumblr, about accessibility ombudsmen, wearing colored arm-bands. That was what I learned from my mom, when she was president of The Clearwater, and Pete Seeger wanted to expand the one day, one stage, annual, fundraising concert/picnic into a two-day, 6 stage, multi-acre music festival, with a craft outlet for local artisans, many international food vendors, and also organizing opportunities for Peace and Environmental activists. And naturally, since she had a disabled daughter, she wanted to make it accessible (This was back in 1978, if I recall correctly -- I would have been 14).

Since this was a pro-peace, anti-military, focused affair, no one wanted to hire cops for security, so they arranged to train volunteers in conflict resolution, who would wear special tee-shirts with a "peacemaker" logo. And it was Mom's idea (I think) to have a subset of those people with accessibility training to wear bright yellow armbands on one sleeve, for extra visibility, so people could flag them down in case someone got stuck or needed help with something.

Anyway, I went to the Festival's official homepage, to double-check my memory. And all that history I remember was erased. The history of that big, two-day festival with all the extras was conflated with the first simple picnic/concerts -- and all of it was credited to Pete Seeger "and friends." Even though, back in 1978, Clearwater's board of directors didn't want to take the risk of expanding it, until my mom backed Pete up at the next meeting. All so they could say it was the oldest festival of its kind (aka older than Woodstock, I think).

And I just ...*flails*

You know?

Anyway -- thanks again for making the wide, wide, world that much wider. And congratulations on surviving the con!

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

That is awesome! Congrats on what sounds like a very successful con!