Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation

by Elizabeth Ellcessor

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479853434
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2016
Series:	Postmillennial Pop , #6
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Ellcessor is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Miller Center. She is the author of Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation and co-editor of Disability Media Studies.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Interrogating and Integrating Access 1

1 Regulating Digital Media Accessibility: #CaptionTHIS 29

2 You Already Know How to Use It: Technology, Disability, and Participation 61

3 Transformers: Accessibility, Style, and Adaptation 89

4 Content Warnings: Struggles over Meaning, Rights, and Equality 123

5 The Net Experience: Intersectional Identities and Cultural Accessibility 157

Conclusion: Collaborative Futures 187

Appendix: Ethnographic Research, Interviews, and Selected Blogs 201

Notes 205

Bibliography 227

Index 239

About the Author 251

Editorial Reviews

"Elizabeth Ellcessor’s inspiring book Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of
Participation lies at the intersection of disability, technology, culture, and bodies, and it raises new questions in these intersecting research fields. It is a timely and welcome work that fills in the research gap between disability studies and media studies.

"

International Journal of Communication

"Ellcessor calls for cultural collaboration that does not exclude disability culture or attempt to erase disability culture in the name of universal design."

Choice

Ellcessor calls for cultural collaboration that does not exclude disability culture or attempt to erase disability culture in the name of universal design.”- Choice

" Restricted Access transforms our understanding of what 'access' means in an age when so much writing on new media fetishizes participation. Elizabeth Ellcessor reveals the ways in which ability, culture, and technology are all entangled in questions of accessibility. Timely and sophisticated, Ellcessor’s book is a major advance in media studies and disability studies, and will also be of great interest to scholars in policy."-Jonathan Sterne,author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format

From the Publisher

"Restricted Accesstransforms our understanding of what 'access' means in an age when so much writing on new media fetishizes participation.Elizabeth Ellcessor reveals the ways in which ability, culture, and technology are all entangled in questions of accessibility. Timely and sophisticated, Ellcessors book is a major advance in media studies and disability studies, and will also be of great interest to scholars in policy."

Jonathan Sterne