That All May Worship

Technology shapes how we worship together.  Before photocopiers, the order of service was printed in the hymnal.  If you couldn’t read it, you could learn it by rote.

 

The copy machine and the microphone have been the dominant technologies in worship for some time.  When the order of service changes frequently and differs from congregation to congregation, you can’t rely on rote memory to follow along.  With the ability to change fonts, it also became possible to make large print orders of service. Other assistive technologies that came along in this same time period include large print and Braille hymnals, and fm headsets.

Technology is changing again, and it presents new opportunities and new barriers. Projection screens in worship encourage us to look up! when we sing. But we still need the large print and braille hymnals. For that matter, we may still need the regular hymnals because those of us who don’t stand may not be able to see the screen when the people in front of us are standing. Looping provides a vastly improved technology for people with hearing loss. This is particularly important in today’s services with multiple voices speaking. Those of us who don’t stand still need a printed order of service, and large print orders of service still matter. With today’s technology we could offer electronic orders of service, so that someone with a text to speech App can hear what’s coming next right in their ear. If an electronic order of service is available in advance, someone with a Brailler at home can print it out.

Live streaming, both audio and video, make it possible for some people to join in worship might not be able to otherwise. Other people, who use a screen reader to get around the Internet, may find live streaming hard to access. That depends somewhat on the technological platform we choose for live streaming, but also on how we set up our websites.

What’s over the horizon? Electronic hymnals? I wonder. Live captioning isn’t that good, yet. But it will be. And Broadway theaters offer audio descriptions over headsets so that blind people get a description of the action on stage. When will that become affordable for congregations?

Technology can include or exclude people with disabilities.  It's up to all of us to pay attention to who's in the room and who isn't, even when it's a virtual room.  It's up to all of us to tell hardware and software providers that accessibility matters to us.  And it's up to all of us to create safe places where people with disabilities can be involved in finding technologies to make worship more accessible for them.

Learn more about live streaming at Please Stream Me Into Worship.

Learn more about audio descriptions at Seeing the Show with their Ears.

- Suzanne Fast