Disability And The Internet

From websites to mobile devices, cyberspace has revolutionized the lived experience of disability - frequently for better, but sometimes for worse. Paul Jaeger offers a sweeping examination of the complex and often contradictory relationships between people with disabilities and the Internet. Tracing the historical and legal evolution of the digital disability divide in the realms of education, work, social life, and culture, and also exploring avenues of policy reform and technology development, Jaeger connects individual experiences with the larger story of technology's promise and limitations for providing equal access online.

Whilst the internet potentially opens up considerable opportunities for disabled people, factors such as cost, lack of advice and information and web inaccessibility could mean that it is less available for disabled than non-disabled people and will increase the disadvantages that disabled people currently suffer.

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.

The emergence of a decentralized, fragmented, and low-cost Internet opened up possibilities for persons with disabilities to lead an independent and inclusive life, which had been denied to them in the physical world. The virtual world, unlike the physical world, was presumed to be devoid of physical, social, and attitudinal barriers that have historically led to the marginalization and exclusion of persons with disabilities. Yet with advancement in technology, concerns of persons with disabilities to access the Internet were relegated to the background. Since the Internet is largely dominated by corporations, this digital divide cannot be bridged without questioning their role; and corporations, as gatekeepers of the virtual world, need to proactively engage in dismantling barriers to accessing the Internet. Corporations and Disability Rights engages with the contemporary discourse on the nature of the right to access the Internet and contextualizes this right within the framework of emerging disability rights jurisprudence. This book explores the interplay between human rights of persons with disabilities and corporate obligation in a technologically advanced society. It argues that under disability rights jurisprudence, the right to access the Internet is a human right and not merely an enabling right. It bridges the existing normative and regulatory gaps for the effective realization of the right to access the Internet.

Media representation of and for the disabled has been recharged in recent years with the expansion of new media worldwide. Interactive digital communications -- such as the Interact, new varieties of voice and text telephones, and digital broadcasting -- have created a need for a more innovative understanding of new media and disability issues. This engaging analysis offers a global perspective on how people with disabilities are represented as users, consumers, viewers, or listeners of new media, by policymakers, corporations, programmers, and the disabled themselves.

This book explores the struggle for disability rights, with a focus on Web equality for people with cognitive disabilities.

Ideal for anyone who owns or makes websites: from the freelance web professional to the corporate in-house design and development department, as well as all companies and government policy makers involved in the development and maintenance of web sites for their institutions, and organizations that provide web-based services to the public. Provides practical techniques for developing completely accessible web sites with a quick reference guide to accessible web site design. This book is for all Web professionals looking for an intuitive route to adding dynamic content from databases to their sites, assuming only HTML. No theory; no philosophy – just techniques and solutions. For web professionals creating.