GUEST BLOG: Kelsie Acton - Survival, Access & Amazon Alexa

In our next Guest Blog, Access Consultant, Kelsie Acton talks about entering the world of PREPPERS and reflects on how interacting with Alexa and thinking about survival has raised questions about how we prepare for access in a new digital world.

Kelsie Acton

I’m Kelsie. I’ve had the pleasure of working on PREPPERS: THE GAME for the last few months, thinking about access. My access consulting work is usually in the world of performance. I know my way around website access, and dabbled a bit in the world of video, but the format of an audio game was very new to me. It’s taught me exciting new things and raised some big questions for me. Preppers brought me up against the edges of what I do and don’t know. 

When I’m sitting in an audience I’m pretty good at knowing how my impairment interacts with the performance. Am I resenting this beautifully scored piece of dance that layers multiple voices in its soundtrack? It’s probably because my audio processing means that my brain can’t pull apart the sound to figure out what the voices are saying. Do I love this VR performance? Could be because my vestibular system loves the weird instability of moving in VR. Did the pre-show information tell me exactly how long each act and the interval is? I feel automatically happier knowing how long I’ll be in the noisy overwhelm of an interval and when I’ll make it home. And usually I can pick out these feelings and separate them from the experience of the performance. I know how the world and I fit together or don’t, the access puzzle, if you like. 

An audio game was a whole new world for me. I learned that being able to work entirely horizontally was a huge gift on particularly high pain days. (And that maybe I should be using devices like Alexa or a screenreader more on those painful days). I’m pretty sure that when I couldn’t hear Alexa when a plane flew over head that was my unique audio processing. But when I repeatedly stalled each version of the game I tried to play through? Is that bad luck? The particular logic of my brain interacting with the logic of the game? That’s harder too because I don’t know if that’s an access problem, or even if it was, how to solve it. Preppers exposed the limits of my understanding of my impairment and how it interacts with the world.

PREPPERS: THE GAME tells us prepping is hope. Prepping is about being prepared for that moment when we encounter the unknown. Both the content of the game itself and the new experience of engaging with an audio game has made me think about how we prepare for new experiences. I’m asking myself, what is in my metaphorical pack as this moment forces me to think about access in the digital and virtual realms instead of the live? If I was prepping to be on the move in a changing world I would carefully select what went in my pack. Wherever I go, however the world changes, access will still be important. The kind of access puzzles I’m solving will change, but there will still be access to consider. So I’m asking myself, how do I prep for that? How do I hope for a world of new access considerations?

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About Kelsie

Kelsie Acton is currently Inclusive Practices Manager at Battersea Arts Centre, and a Phd Candidate at the University of Alberta, researching timing in integrated dance. She is also the Co-Artistic Director of CRIPSiE, Edmonton's integrated dance company. Her research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and her art has been supported by the Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. She is certified in Dance Ability, the internationally recognized system for teaching inclusive dance improvisation.