In the film Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau would tell all that visited his restaurant that anyone can cook. He inspired the rat in the film, who went on to make masterpieces, and real life brand Maggi believed the same.
Known for noodles, soups, and seasonings, the Swiss brand’s products are used in kitchens all over the world by professionals and the more casual cook at home. Maggi knew their reach could go even further. In Brazil, they worked closely with the Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind. The result was a multi sensory cookbook, which Maggi titled Cooking Blindly, or “Cozinha Ă s Cegas” in Portuguese.
The book is a 130 page work of art. It combines the creativity of cuisine with so many different design ideas, stimulating as many of the five senses in every way it can.
There are embossed images so readers can feel the textures of ingredients, as well as Braille to read.
There are audio descriptions and sounds of sizzling steaks, so readers know what to listen out for.
There are local spices and fragrances behind tabs, so readers know what goes well together, appealing to the sense of smell.
For those with low vision, the pages are charcoal black with bold large type in the signature Maggi colours of mustard yellow and chilli red.
There are even tools tailored to help making cooking easier, like thermometers that say the temperatures aloud.
All these innovations, it’s like they thought of everything.
Alexandre Munck, Executive Superintendent at the Dorina Foundation said, “Everyone has the right to learn and be able to prepare their own food.”
Reading, Writing, Arithmetic. These are the Three R’s of Education, even though only one word actually begins with the letter R.
But now Lego have stepped in to change things for the blind community and people with low vision, with the Three B’s.
Braille Building Bricks.
The Danish toy brand developed bricks with the help of blind organisations from all over the world, with the traditional studs on top forming individual letters and numbers in Braille.Â
Lego first announced these bricks to the world in 2020, and gave them to schools to encourage children with a fun way to learn. Technology has made things easier, with text readers for example, but many say that having the option is always better. The European Blind Union says that having an understanding of Braille helps in higher levels of education and can lead to better jobs.
This September, Lego released packs for the public to buy in the UK, which they hope will lead to a closer bond between parents and children as they learn braille together. Available from Lego.com, packs of bricks come in five colours, have fun online classes to go along with them, and they can fit with other Lego sets.
Because Everything Is Awesome when you’re part of a team.
Threads, Mark Zuckerberg’s newest social media platform, arrived on July 5th. Gaining 100 million users in the first five days, it quickly tried to position itself as the successor to Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.
Most things that Meta have come up with build on existing ideas, and in this case there was a clear and known framework to follow and improve upon. They started off strong by targeting those who had left Twitter after Musk made some less than popular changes. Threads’ key advantages are posts can have longer text, and you can upload longer videos than you can on an unverified X account.
However, there are some aspects that have not been taken on, and it has raised some questions.
One of these features is replies. When you reply to a post on the X app, the most recent responses can be seen first. Threads shows them the other way around, with the oldest reply first, making it difficult to tell the order of a back and forth discussion.
Also currently missing from Threads is the ability to use Hashtags. They make it easy for a community to find similar themes and discussions, but at the moment, hashtags do not connect to one another.
Trending topics make it easy to find out what’s happening in the world, but this too is absent from Threads.
And then there’s alt text.
It might be a bit much to think Threads should be a complete copy of X, so there should be some things to keep them separate. However, Alt Text should not have been one of those things.
User generated alt text is the written description that explains an image, so the wider community has access to the same information, even with limited vision. It is important for making any brand inclusive, especially a social media platform like this. Putting the function on shouldn’t even be hard. Usually a small button to click, and everyone is on the same page.
Zuckerberg has since made a statement that alt text, among other things, will be addressed over the course of August. Except, Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta, who own Facebook and WhatsApp. He’s been involved in communication for so long that something like this shouldn’t have been missed. It leads me to ask why nobody thought of sorting things like this for all users from the beginning. Currently, some people are able to upload images and videos with alt text, but many others still don’t have the function. Â
In the device settings, go to the accessibility drop down, and the alt text function button might be available to switch on.
Coming from the team behind Instagram, a site that is mostly about the visuals, Threads should have been able to set itself up as a positive force for creativity and diversity, having learned what works for other social media platforms. The Threads Project Head, Adam Mosseri, said that the difference between Instagram and Threads is not about “text versus photos and videos, and more about what public conversations you want to have”. Yet they proceeded to leave out an aspect that would make those conversations so much easier. Overlooking something as fundamental as that upon launch makes it seem as though it was an afterthought. Definitely not a good look.
Ruth Handler wasn’t a homely woman, raising her babies and doing the housework. She was out co-founding a business with her husband that would later take the world by storm. That business was Mattel, started in 1945 and now an international toy enterprise. Ruth never played with dolls herself, but she knew her market. Returning from work, Handler watched her daughter playing with these little paper dolls. You had to cut them out along with their separate clothes, which you then had to attach. She played with them for hours and hours. They’re fiddly and annoying. They aren’t fun. Quite rightly, Handler thought her daughter deserved better.
It was the ’50s, and baby dolls were the one of the most popular toys of the time. Handler wanted her daughter to think that she could be anything growing up, not just a mother and a wife. That wasn’t all that she was, and it wasn’t all she wanted for her daughter. So, in 1959, the first Barbie doll was released. A doll to reflect the modern woman of the time. Barbie wore what she wanted, went where she wanted, and wasn’t relying on a man to look after her.
Fast forward 60 years, and Barbie has had every career going. She wasn’t simply dressing up and going to fancy parties with her tag-along, afterthought boyfriend, Ken. No. She went to the moon. And she did it years before Neil Armstrong did in real life. Laziness on his part if you ask me. She has been a paramedic, a pilot in the Air Force, and a president of the United States. With the world accepting that women could do anything, Barbie was there to inspire upcoming generations.
In 2015, the Fashionistas line had hundreds of new designs. There were Barbies with different shapes, skin tones, and heights. This included dolls without hair, some with vitiligo, and a cornrowed Ken. By 2019, dolls were released reflecting disabilities as well, featuring those using wheelchairs, hearing aids, and prosthetics. In the UK, the top two bestselling Fashionista dolls were in fact the ones using wheelchairs.
“Barbie has continued to evolve over the years to better reflect the world girls see today, adding more diversity for endless storytelling possibilities,” Mattel said on their Barbie website.
So, of course, this had to come up in the Barbie film, showing exactly how far times have changed. One of the first scenes is a sequence of very different women, with a voice-over declaring “this is Barbie” for each one of them.
Because Barbie is every woman. Even from the start, her creation wasn’t about her being blonde and white. She was about the joy of growing up and the freedom to do whatever they desired. Not being confined by ideas of gender or disability. She represented a wider world to those who play with dolls. As such, she was always meant to change and embrace all looks and aspects of womanhood.
As I finish writing, I too am embracing these aspects before going to view the film in all its technicolor glory. In an Oppenheimer hat.
2018 was a huge deal for diversity in film. For fans of super heroes, there wasn’t always much in the way of representation onscreen. When Black Panther came out, people of colour finally felt like they had a big name black character to relate to. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse continued that trend with a strong black character in the forefront with a strong family connection and a diverse group of friends all with their own powers, emphasising that nobody is ever really alone and “anyone can wear the mask”. It was a big thing for Miles Morales, the Spider-Man of the story, knowing he wasn’t alone and that he had people out there he could relate to and count on. Community was being embraced, and the world was loving it.
2023, and there’s a new film, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. As Miles faces a new threat too big for him to deal with alone, he meets the Spider Society. This is a team of the best Spider-people from multiple realities, brought together by Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Man of 2099. After helping Spider-Man India in his reality, Miguel and Miles disagree about how to handle a forthcoming “canon event”. Miguel says a tragic event has to happen in Spider-people’s stories to make them the heroes they’re meant to be. Miles refuses to accept that, and flees from the Society to find a portal back home. Miguel sends everyone after him, leading to a huge chase scene featuring a Spider-Mobile, a Lego Spider-Man, and a Spider-Cat. As Miles tries to escape, he encounters a Spider-person in a wheelchair. A wheelchair that is crawling on the ceiling. She leaps down to hit him with her crutches, making a comment about Spider-people tending to use humour as a crutch, before acknowledging the poor joke.
Turns out this was Sun-Spider, a Spider-Woman with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a condition that affects connective tissue, and can impact joint movement, meaning sometimes there is a need for help walking.
The buzz surrounding the first film allowed fans to make versions of themselves as characters in the film, creating their own fan art “Spider-sonas” online. One such fan was Dayn Broder, a comic editor, illustrator, and freelance writer with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Her character, Sun-Spider, even uses her crutches to webswing.
There’s no reason why a person with mobile disabilities shouldn’t be out there saving the world; Spider-Man was the first comics character to fully cover his face with his costume, and even in that, it meant anyone could wear the mask.
“As a disabled person, I almost never get to see any disabled super heroes,” said Broder.
“I wanted to create someone like me: an ambulatory wheelchair user, who can still kick butt in her own modified way. Sun-Spider is hyper-flexible, though this does have drawbacks since it means she requires extra stability, and the crutches help with that.”
Something Marvel Comics editorial loved so much that, for their 2020 Edge of Spider-Verse crossover event, Broder was contacted to incorporate the character, with “Charlotte Webber” getting her own individual storyline fighting her own version of Doctor Octopus at prom.
It all came full circle when Sun-Spider was recruited to help in the events of Across the Spider-Verse, where she is voiced by wheelchair-using comedian Danielle Perez.
“I screamed when I saw the wheelchair mech!! what an amazing design!”
Understandably, Broder was very happy upon seeing the way the film had incorporated the wheelchair and how its worked with Sun-Spider’s abilities. Character designer Kris Anka took the best parts of Broder’s initial drawings and really brought them to life.
She might have been at odds with Miles in the film’s climactic chase scene, but she was a hero in her world. And in our world, where we love to see heroes surpass barriers, the Spider-Verse continues to weave a web of inspiration and inclusivity, inviting us all to join the fight.
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