Our joint panel of two 90-minute sessions with three papers each explores how technological designs both old and new enable sensory access in professional and artistic contexts. We represent a variety of backgrounds across language, literature, and media studies to demonstrate and argue for new ways of putting into practice theoretical and methodological solutions regarding critical disability studies on the senses.

Brian Due (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Distributed Perception Between Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, Visually Impaired Persons, Volunteers and Material Surroundings

Be My Eyes is a company specialising in providing help to visually impaired persons using recent advancements in technology. In this presentation, I explore their “Call a Volunteer” service on Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. This service enables hands-free accessibility for blind and low-vision people. The user initiates a Be My Eyes’ “Call a Volunteer” experience entirely by voice command. Saying “Hey Meta, Call a Volunteer on Be My Eyes” will connect users to a sighted volunteer who speaks the user’s language via a one-way video, two-way audio call. Through this integration, the volunteers see through the lens of the smart glasses to provide a real-time description to the user through their open-ear speakers. Thus, this empirical material contributes to the theoretical development of distributed perception between different types of agents (Due, 2021). Data is ethnographically collected and video-recorded interactions from the person’s everyday life. Data is analysed using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (Mondada, 2019).
Keywords: distributed perception, visual impairment, ethnomethodological CA

Maija Hirvonen (Tampere University, Finland)

Subjective, Intersubjective, and Collective: Perspectivation of Experience in Translatory Team Work Between Blind and Sighted Members

This talk discusses perspectivation of experience in real-world interaction between blind and sighted professional audio-describers when they are writing and editing verbal translations of visual contents in audiovisual media. While audio description (AD) has established as an access service across the world, it is only in some countries that the professional practice uses teams involving also non-sighted team members.
Since the AD teams constantly exchange thoughts, perceptions, and the like in order to develop a shared understanding of the film or the verbalisations, the perspectivation of experience is highly relevant. Verbal language is perspectival to start with (Graumann & Kallmeyer 2002), and with manifold linguistic devices, the team members can profile different experiences: they can display the perception of a situation from their own, subjective experience, from the intersubjective, shared experience, or even from a collective perspective. They go beyond what a team as an entity knows or perceives, extending the locally available knowledge to a collective-cultural level (Hirvonen 2024). The talk overviews the interactional practices and the multimodal-linguistic devices for perspectivation found between blind and sighted members in AD teams.
Keywords: experience, perspectivation, meaning negotiation, blind-sighted-interaction

Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo (Tampere University, Finland)

Making Voice Knowable: Analysing Rehabilitation Interventions for Patients with Parkinson's Disease

The human voice is essential to communication, connecting individuals to the world and reflecting their presence. However, scientific fields studying the phenomenon differ in their focus by examining either the meanings of speech or the bodily mechanisms that produce acoustic phenomena. In my presentation, I will debate this gap by utilizing Bernard Stiegler's (2020) concept of general organology. The theory brings together the study of bodily organs, technological objects and social organizations and asks how these three aspects (biological, technological and social) come together. Within this framework voice is something that is continually being worked on.
As empirical material, I will use data based on rehabilitation methods for Parkinson's disease patients. I will analyse how knowledge about voice production and the current body capacity of the PD patients were intertwined with different measuring technologies and how social, and societal conceptions about voice were contextualizing the sessions. I debate how the interventions were attempts to make voice knowable extending beyond the practices of specific disciplines and professional fields.

Keywords: voice, embodiment, sensory practices, STS