Talking Vision 731 Week Beginning 3rd of June 2024

hear from them very shortly. And then after you hear from Lauren and Michaela this week, I catch up with Vision Australia chair Bill jolly. He's celebrated six months in the role as chair, and I catch up with him to have a chat about how the six months have panned out. I hope you'll enjoy this week's episode of

Talking Vision. Our first two guests today are involved in the panel The Working Artist Redefining Access, who minds our access business run as part of the Disrupting Site at Ableism series through the Arts Centre Melbourne, in conjunction with Vita Veritas. Their names are Lauren Hayes and Michaela Schmidt, and it's my great pleasure to welcome them now. Lauren. Michaela, welcome back to Talking Vision. Thank you very much for your time.

hear from in a moment, and Olivia muscat. And so we are going to be talking about some of the access barriers that face artists, particularly those who are blind, and ways that we can be addressing those challenges.

be more metro based. So I'll be bringing a regional perspective to the panel and trying to shine a light on some of the barriers that regional disabled artists face. And yeah, I also work a bit as a freelance access consultant and mainly for theatre companies and arts venues. So helping them with their physical access and particularly around access for blind patrons and artists. Yeah, helping to help

companies make their work more accessible. Yeah, both for audience members, but also for artists who might want to come and work in their venues.

I also work in the digital accessibility space, so I do audits of apps and websites to make sure they meet all of their web content accessibility guidelines and provide training around creating accessible content and the basics of screen readers. For people who may not be as familiar with those. I was formerly based in Melbourne and now I live

in Aotearoa New Zealand and work across both countries. In terms of my role on the day as moderator, I'll really be fielding questions from the audience but also asking our panelists questions, but sharing insights. We're kind of we're going with with a little bit of a kind of bouncing ideas off each other sort of session rather than having it as a really formal thing, because we felt like working in a in a more casual way within a structure still, but we felt that would work better.

I'm not going to give too much away, but we have some what we think are cool themes for the session that we want to explore, but you'll have to come along and find out what they are.

sector and what they're up to and. Wondered if there might be ways that we could collaborate together. And so we've worked on a couple of projects already this year, and so I'm excited to be working on this panel as well with Nilgun and Makayla.

with her, which I think is really exciting. It's great to hear that the concept of audio description is becoming more widely known amongst mainstream artists. So yeah, that's exciting.

or role to role. And so it's really tricky to say it's almost it almost makes you feel as if people are looking for that kind of box ticking approach to meeting your access requirements. So I guess that's one aspect of it. Then once you have your foot in the door and you're working either as an arts worker, so you might be doing an administrative role or you may be working as a performer, it's then communicating your access requirements and feeling like you're being listened to and heard,

but also being supported. So in my experience, just working with a lot of artists, people find that they have to be their own consultant, like their own access consultant, in addition to performing. So they can't just turn up and get on and perform. They have to advocate for the things that they need to make that work more accessible. Whereas if they had somebody who could work with them and perhaps advocate on their behalf, then that would take

some of that pressure off a little bit. So I think it's just changing some of those expectations around what we are required to do as artists and perhaps not blending those, the artist and the consultant role as much because they can be quite different. And even though we cross both, sometimes I think separating them out a little bit is helpful. They're some of my perspectives, but I'd love to hear what Mikayla has to say as she's

been performing much more recently than I have. So I think would have some fresher perspectives as well.

and arts workers at events. And one thing I learned pretty early on that was that figuring out my branding was going to be important because, as Lauren mentioned, you know, I primarily want to be a performer and an artist. And so often I get asked to be either just an access consultant or to be an access consultant on top of performing in a show. And so firstly, kind of working out my branding and having the confidence to make that clear to the people who might be contracting

me as important to work out. But then also if I have made that really clear of what my role or my expertise is for that to actually be heard, I feel that, yeah, we're still learning in the sector to not just box disabled artists into those stereotyped disabled roles.

So yeah, and I think particularly as a regional artist, I find that people think they're doing a really good thing by asking me to do everything, you know, the creative work and the accessibility work, because then they feel like, oh, we've been really good. We've employed someone local, someone regional to do everything. But that's not necessarily the bet. You know, it's possible to have more than one disabled person working

on one project. That's totally fine. And so I think, yeah, learning to look a little bit further, do a little bit more research, because there are both disabled artists and access consultants out there, and I think people learning how to find them and do the networking, rather than us always having to be the ones reaching out and doing that networking would be great as well if you're not disabled. So yeah, I guess for the disabled person it's about

thinking about your. Branding and what you're willing to do. And then for the non-disabled people, it's about doing more research and networking to find those people.

disabilities in that organisation. And so they want to make sure that they're meeting all of the accessibility guidelines. But that might not be a person's strength, and they're having to do that on top of their regular work. And even though I suppose they're incorporating it into their hours, so they're still getting paid. But I feel like it's an unfair expectation to put on someone that just because they have a disability, they can provide all of this

advice and expertise on something. It's like we have accessibility consultants for a reason, who you can bring in for

particular things. And if more venues hired those consultants on a regular basis, just to make sure that things were in check, both in terms of physical access and digital and then the art space, just being that person who can help with making sure an artist's requirements are met, it would just mean that we could turn up and get on with the jobs that we've been employed to do, and not have to take on all this extra stuff as well.

website at VA radio.org. That's VA radio.org to make a donation. Every little bit helps and your generosity is of course greatly appreciated. And now back to the show and my chat with Bill jolly. A few weeks back, Bill jolly celebrated six months as chair of Vision Australia following the conclusion of Andrew Moffat's tenure as chair in October of 2023. And to mark the occasion, it was my great pleasure to catch up with Bill to look back over the

past six months. Bill, welcome back to Talking Vision. Thank you very much for your time.

can continue to deliver services. It has been a pretty tough time for the Australian community generally over the last couple of years with inflation, which is eroding people's purchasing power. And we have the same problem at Vision Australia where costs increase, wages increase, but our government grants and other income doesn't necessarily or doesn't usually increase at the same rate. So we've had to be ever more frugal in our

cost allocations and careful in our decision making. But I'm pleased that we have a very strong team headed by Ron Hutton, our CEO, and Justine Heath, our chief financial officer, and we've been able to keep things on an even keel over this period. And a highlight for us was,

of course, Carols by Candlelight. And for the first time in many years, I, as chair, made a little appearance on Carols by Candlelight to thank the Australian public for their generous support of Vision Australia and in particular our children's services. And we raised more than $1 million last year through our partnership with channel nine and our lead sponsor, Aimee. So that was a very good way to lead into Christmas for us.

the sector. So what does it mean to you to have that sort of thing culminate in this role that you now occupy as chair of Vision Australia, an organisation with which you have had an association for so long?

But I didn't realise, of course, the challenge that having a blind child presents for that child's parents and in my case, my parents had four children who were. But no history in the family. So it was very important for them that the organizations were there to support and guide them in the nurturing and the raising of their children, and it was very important that they had high expectations of us children, and also that we had both peers

and role models to look up to. And so as I've sort of gone through life initially as a youngster thinking that I wanted to change the world as young people often do, and realising as one gets older that most of the things that we do, we do for a pretty good reason. So it's my responsibility now to be the really the chief custodian of Vision Australia's culture and its service delivery. I'm reminded of then of how Vision Australia was or the predecessor. Organisations were very important

for my parents, important for my family. Then, as we had one of our children who has low vision and is important today for the young parents and the parents of the young children who are new to the world of blindness and low vision. So that supportive role, that Vision Australia plays for families is a very important role. Plus, of course, our direct service that we provide to children, adults and to seniors so that as you go through life, you see often you see the same things but from

different perspectives. And as I look back, I look back on an organisation, Vision Australia, which has a proud history through its predecessor organisations. It has also maintained very high standards of service and I've had a fair bit of international involvement and I'm quite satisfied that Australia's services to people who are blind or have low vision are world class, that Australia overall is a pretty good place to live, that it's a pretty good time for blind people to

have been born with Braille and synthetic speech. And as I say, our services and our society infrastructure are pretty good.

for profit sector. But what other sort of challenges do you perhaps foresee in 2024 and in the future, for example, the changes to the NDIS and what that will mean for blindness and low vision organisations as well as, you know, disability organisations more broadly.

in Vision Australia. That is where we make sure that our staff have appropriate registration, that they have ongoing training and supervision, so we're pretty well set up there. I think one of the really interesting challenges coming forward for us, which is also an opportunity, comes out of this thing that everyone's talking about now called AI and AI or artificial intelligence, really means that we're having a giant or a great leap forward in the capacity of computers to

do things. And these large language models, such as ChatGPT and the ones put out by Google and other companies, one that I use is by a company called perplexity. They will enable people to increase their productivity, to find information more quickly, to draft reports and school students, to draft answers to questions, which then they'll have the responsibility

to go through and fix up properly. This is going to make a big difference to the whole of society, and we've got to see that it also works well for blind people, and that blind people using screen reader and magnification technology are able to also to get the benefits of AI. So we're having a look at that at Vision Australia and doing some specific work to help our clients to understand artificial intelligence and to understand how

to use it. So as well as the traditional services that we've been having for many years, our services need to evolve as the. External environment changes. And that's something that we consider is very important. But we'll continue to provide those services for older people with our orthoptists and our occupational therapists. So we have the full range of services that continue, but we're always looking to do things

a bit differently and do things more effectively. It's a very exciting time to be the chair of Vision Australia. I have a great team around me, other directors on the board and our leadership team headed by Ron. So it's a very good, very good time and I'm looking forward to the next couple of years being very beneficial for our clients.

for now. Do you have any sort of final words that you'd like to share with our listeners as we finish up today in terms of looking forward to the future, the exciting things to come, but also what Vision Australia's role is looking like in 2024 and beyond.

reach out to Vision Australia. If you have any issues or concerns in relation to your daily living and other people, I thank you for your support of Vision Australia and we'll continue to do what we do to the very best of our ability and capacity to do so.