So, my team didn’t go to worlds, but having watched some and heard about it later, seems like there was some pretty intense strobe lights going on during matches.
First of all, I feel like that might mess with robot vision stuff. Did anyone have problems with their limelight or anything because of it?
Secondly, I am worried that there wasn’t any warnings about the lights. As a disabled person who would 100% be negatively affected by strobe lights, this doesn’t make me feel confident about going to competitions safely
Combined with the unnecessarily loud music, I feel like first isn’t being very ADA compliant. This doesn’t match with their message of inclusion.
I have a couple other things like more reliable subtitles, mobility-aid accessible seating, and slightly quieter music I’d love to get first to implement, but the strobe lights are an immediate safety concern for many.
I mean, strobe lights don’t just affect people with sensory sensitivities. Not to be dark or anything but I know people with epilepsy who genuinely could have had horrible seizures or maybe died. How can we insure that for all future events things are a bit more chill, or at least warned about?
How can I feel safe going to comp if I don’t know if the environment will be inaccessible for me?
Thank you for reminding me to reach out to HQ on the strobe lights.
We know of several people in attendance who were not a fan of those lights.
Love the effort HQ is putting into making the finale loud and intense for Einstein, but we can do better and tone some aspects down a couple notches.
The strobes were not running during matches luckily.
There were absolutely 0 warnings. During the opening ceremonies on day 2, the strobes were run for an excessively long time (felt like over a minute). The strobes were heavily spammed and abused during the Einstein matches. Score just got revealed, spam strobes. Award winners just got revealed, spam strobes. Teams got introduced, spam strobes. Music is happening between matches, spam strobes. There was almost never a time except during matches when strobes were not spammed. It was horrible and the strobes alone ruined the experience during Einstein.
The strobes affected everyone there negatively. I as a non-photosensitive person had a huge headache that prevented me from enjoying or analyzing the Einstein matches and about half of my team had similar complaints.
I have already filled back the feedback survey and made sure to note that the strobes are experience ruining and completely unacceptable. There is 0 reason to be running them like this, they only do great harm for no benefit.
I made a similar thread after my champs experience. It’s pretty awful and a lot of the school I missed as a student came from recovering after events from the sensory overload and how overstimulating it all is. Not to mention how poorly wheelchair accessible it was. Really the whole works. It makes a program I love with all my heart so much less accessable, and after taking a lot of health risks to come to CMP in the first place, missing an entire day of matches at the hotel with a migraine and having strobe lights causing a rebound was pretty miserable. But at least for me it wasn’t life threatening. The lack of warnings for people with seizures of epilepsy is not acceptable, and I can’t imagine it’s even legal tbh. We’re lucky no one was seriously hurt afaik, but still terrible.
I agree with this so much, I really love frc and it breaks my heart that if we had qualified for worlds i would have had to miss it.
Oh and its very illegal but nobody cares about the laws of the ADA🙁
To be fair, the primary message of FIRST is “tHe ShOw!!! See guys, we’re just like sports!”
Inclusion is somewhere pretty far down the list.
Yeah, I see that, however I think they are creating an unsafe environment
Spamming strobes like they did is not a good way of doing that. At best it annoying to everyone watching the matches and makes FIRST look incompetent.
Can confirm, sports productions are not like this.
I had to leave, and I do lighting for sportsball for a living.
That’s what I thought, but I’m not a big sport person myself so I wasn’t sure lol
If you ever watch a game at Dodger Stadium, they use strobe lights for home run celebrations.
I would wager that folks who are sensitive to said lights have issues–but I would also note that they’re relatively easy to avoid, and relatively weak compared to the stadium lights. (IIRC, they’re meant to simulate camera flashes.) I would also say that any normal person would have no issues unless they got caught in the face.
I know there’s a few other folks who do lighting, professionally or as amateurs. Anybody want to take a guess at how many people working around that industry we could get to sign a letter to HQ saying “lose the strobes, and discipline whoever suggested using them like that”? (I’d also suggest the photosensitive folks do the same, but with different reasons.)
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