Thought-provoking pushback on visual descriptions of speakers in meetings and events

This is a message I posted on the NTEN Community Accessibility forum (free to join!) and the helpful conclusions I drew from it.

Original Post

With NTC coming up next week, visual descriptions are on my mind, and I’d love to share what I’m thinking in order to hear from other people.

When I say “visual descriptions”, I mean the practice of people describing their appearance and maybe something about their location either in-person or in virtual meetings. It has become a “best practice” in some communities, and it’s not a clear-cut good based on what I’ve learned.

Since I am neither blind nor have low-vision, I rely on the voices of those who do and who this practice is intended to support. I’ve now seen two surveys of blind and low-vision people where a majority of people did not like the practice:

The second link in particular is a rich resource containing comments describing why people hold their opinions. It feels like it captures the reasonable diversity of opinions and experiences that people would have. In “A Case for Why We Should Not Do Visual Descriptions of Ourselves” one person speaks at length about some of the downsides, intentionally being a little provocative:

“My point is that the exercise is actually depriving us of information while creating a false sense of inclusion. It’s not entirely honest to describe ourselves by the color of our clothes, the amount of pigment in our skin, and our age. Therefore, we are not getting the equivalent descriptions that sighted people get. We don’t know if someone on the call has pancaked makeup on their face, if they are breathtakingly handsome, or if there are visible clues to their sexual orientation. Instead we accept the most superficial and arguably useless details while what we might really want to know is excluded from the visual description.”

There is clearly room for different opinions on this issue, and I would be remiss to acknowledge that a lot of people do like the practice. So I wanted to share this and continue that discussion.

In this moment, my own approach is to focus on whatever is directly relevant to the meeting or presentation topic and then make sure you incorporate that information for the benefit of all (not just blind or low-vision folks). If I’m talking about accessibility, I’m sure to clarify that I don’t have a visible disability and I also don’t personally identify as someone with a visibility. If I’m talking about race, then I identify that I’m a white man with all the unfair advantages that identity brings.

As is often the case, the right answer is probably “it depends” and “be thoughtful”. What do you think? Should this be a general “best practice”? How are you approaching it?

Responses & New Thoughts

I got some great responses, which are worth reading in full, but here were a few of my key takeaways:

  1. Even if surveys suggest 70% of people who “need” descriptions don’t like them, 30% is a real number, representing tons of people.
  2. Events should always ask about accessibility accommodations. This could be an accommodation people request, and it should absolutely be honored, if so.
  3. There is an inherent value in making people think about accessibility accommodations. This is a practice that makes accommodations very prominent. However, I want to balance that with the risk of being performative. (This reminds me of visible “alt text” that is popular on some blogs with a social justice bent. That’s worthy of a separate blog post.)
  4. It’s ableist to assert “what disabled people need,” so I don’t want to be implementing a practice that could alienate people. (“Nothing for us without us” is a key motto of the disability rights movement!)
  5. It is good and necessary to proactively strive to make our events accessible. There are details like this one that can be tricky and are probably worth debating, but making our events accessible shouldn’t be debated.

What do you think?

If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them in the comments, or—better yet—in the NTEN forum!