Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation Main Menu Regulating Digital Media Accessibility: #CaptionTHIS Chapter 1 You Already Know How to Use It: Technology, Disability, and Participation Chapter 2 Transformers: Accessibility, Style, and Adaptation Chapter 3 Content Warnings: Struggles over Meaning, Rights, and Equality Chapter 4 The Net Experience: Intersectional Identities and Cultural Accessibility Chapter 5 Conclusion: Collaborative Futures Conclusion Additional Resources Disability Blogs, Overview of Accessibility Practices, and Accessibility Resources NYU Press

Introduction: Interrogating and Integrating Access

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While digital media can offer many opportunities for civic and cultural participation, this technology is not equally easy for everyone to use. Hardware, software, and cultural expectations combine to make some technologies an easier fit for some bodies than for others. A YouTube video without closed captions or a social network site that is incompatible with a screen reader can restrict the access of users who are hard of hearing or visually impaired. Often, people with disabilities require accommodation, assistive technologies, or other forms of aid to make digital media accessible—useable—for them.

Restricted Access investigates digital media accessibility—the processes by which media is made usable by people with particular needs—and argues for the necessity of conceptualizing access in a way that will enable greater participation in all forms of mediated culture. If digital media open up opportunities for individuals to create and participate, but that technology only facilitates the participation of those who are already privileged, then its progressive potential remains unrealized

The study of media access is a complex phenomenon, stretching from digital divides literatures to work on public broadcasting, user-generated-content, community television, media literacy, and policy literatures. This book proposes and enacts a five-part approach to studying access. It is a kind of "access kit," with parts that may be used separately or in concert with one another. Each category is loosely defined by a set of research questions, found in the text of the full book, and is each of the book's chapters is focused on one of these categories.

Regulation

 

Use

 

Form

Content

Experience


The conclusion extends these discussions.

 

This page has paths:

  1. Restricted Access Elizabeth Ellcessor

Contents of this path:

  1. Introduction: New media, new problems