This guide will assist you with researching accessible technologies topics for this course. Topics cover how leaders and organizations utilize and advocate for access technologies to facilitate signed, spoken, and written communication, such as captioned media, mobile applications, and voice recognition software, and the next generation of access technologies. This guide assists in finding articles, using selected databases and websites, and search tips. Below is the library catalog where you can type in your keywords to find books and videos.
The course text, Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation is available to you as an e-Book. Multiple users can simultaneously access the book.
If you have questions, feel free to contact me, Joan Naturale - I am the NTID and Deaf Studies Librarian and am happy to help.
Restricted Access: media, disability, and the politics of participation
How reconsidering digital media and participatory cultures from the standpoint of disability allows for a full understanding of accessibility. 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. Drawing on disability and cultural studies, Elizabeth Ellcessor uses an interrogatory framework based around issues of regulation, use, content, form, and experience to examine contemporary digital media. Through interviews with policy makers and accessibility professionals, popular culture and archival materials, and an ethnographic study of internet use by people with disabilities, Ellcessor reveals the assumptions that undergird contemporary technologies and participatory cultures. Restricted Access makes the crucial point that 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. Engagingly written with powerful examples, Ellcessor demonstrates the importance of alternate uses, marginalized voices, and invisible innovations in the context of disability identities to push us to rethink digital media accessibility.
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