Tagged: disability studies

Disability and Rehabilitation: Special Issue on Universal Design


Disability and Rehabilitation have published a Special Issue on Universal Design (vol 36, no. 16, 2014), edited by Rob Imrie and Rachael Luck. This includes my paper Web accessibility standards and disability: developing critical perspectives on accessibility‘ (abstract follows below). If you would like to download the paper, but do not have access to the journal you can access one of 15 ePrints I have to give away (this access has now expired 22/01/2015). Alternatively, get in touch with me directly via selewthwaite [at] gmail.com. Here are the details:

Abstract: Web accessibility standards and disability: developing critical perspectives on accessibility.

Purpose: Currently, dominant web accessibility standards do not respect disability as a complex and culturally contingent interaction; recognizing that disability is a variable, contrary and political power relation, rather than a biological limit. Against this background there is clear scope to broaden the ways in which accessibility standards are understood, developed and applied.
Methods: Commentary.
Results: The values that shape and are shaped by legislation promote universal, statistical and automated approaches to web accessibility. This results in web accessibility standards conveying powerful norms fixing the relationship between technology and disability, irrespective of geographical, social, technological or cultural diversity.
Conclusions: Web accessibility standards are designed to enact universal principles; however, they express partial and biopolitical understandings of the relation between disability and technology. These values can be limiting, and potentially counter-productive, for example, for the majority of disabled people in the “Global South” where different contexts constitute different disabilities and different experiences of web access. To create more robust, accessible outcomes for disabled people, research and standards practice should diversify to embrace more interactional accounts of disability in different settings.

Imrie and Luck’s special issue is a landmark collection in the conceptual development of Universal Design.  Amongst the papers, ‘Parallels and problems of normalization in rehabilitation and universal design: enabling connectivities’, by Barbara E. Gibson is available as an Open Access PDF. Other titles include:

  • ‘Designing inclusive environments: rehabilitating the body and the relevance of universal design’, by Rob Imrie, Rachael Luck
  • ‘Universally design social policy: when disability disappears?’ by Jerome Bickenbach
  • ‘Universal design and the challenge of diversity: reflections on the principles of UD, based on empirical research of people’s mobility’ by Myriam Winance
  • ‘Universal Design and disability: an interdisciplinary perspective’ by Inger Marie Lid
  • ‘DeafSpace and the principles of universal design’ by Claire Edwards and Gill Harold
  • ‘About the nature of design in universal design’ by Ann Heylighen
  • ‘Situating universal design architecture: designing with whom?’ by Paul Jones

Further presentations and podcasts from the series of seminars that led this this special issue are available via the universalising design project website which rewards exploration. Comments and questions, as ever, are welcome! 

Cuts to grant funding for disabled students will put their studies at risk


Today the Guardian published my evidenced-based take on proposed cuts to Disabled Students Allowances. 

Image of article on cuts to disability grants on Guardian website
Image of article on cuts to disability grants on Guardian website

On April 6th 2014, the minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts MP, announced sweeping cuts and changes to Disabled Students’ Allowances in England. These cuts threaten disabled and dyslexic students’ studies.

I strongly advise all UK readers to petition these cuts and contact you MPs to ensure a parliamentary debate and Equality Impact Assessment before any changes to DSAs are made.

Web Standards and the Majority World / Rhetorical AccessAbility: Out Now!


Front cover of Rhetorical AccessAbility edited by Lisa Meloncon
Front cover of Rhetorical AccessAbility

A new book Rhetorical AccessAbility: At the Intersection of Technical Communication and Disability Studies, edited by Lisa Meloncon at the University of Cincinnati is out now!

I penned a chapter for this book in collaboration with Henny Swan, Senior Accessibility Specialist (iPlayer and Mobile) at the BBC. Together we consider ‘Web Standards and the Majority World’, taking a socio-cultural look at the values that web standards convey to a global audience.  In particular we were interested in examining the ways in which Web Standards can export Minority (that is developed/Northern/post-industrial) notions of disability to the Majority world, with potentially counter-productive results. We make our arguments by attending closely to Web Standards as a form of technical writing through the lens of critical disability studies and research. Disability scholars might be interested to know that aspects of this chapter were informed by MMU‘s inaugural Disability and the Majority World conference, an event (now with accompanying journal Disability and the Global South) developed by Dr Shaun Grech that seeks to globalize disability studies.

Rhetorical AccessAbility is published as part of Baywood’s Technical Communications Series (Edited by series editor Charles H. Sides). The publishers’ book summary follows.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Rhetorical Accessability is the first text to bring the fields of technical communication and disability studies into conversation. The two fields also share a pragmatic foundation in their concern with accommodation and accessibility—that is, the material practice of making social and technical environments and texts as readily available, easy to use, and/or understandable as possible to as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. Through its concern with the pragmatic, theoretically grounded work of helping users interface effectively and seamlessly with technologies, the field of technical communication is perfectly poised to put the theoretical work of disability studies into practice. In other words, technical communication could ideally be seen as a bridge between disability theories and web accessibility practices.

While technical communicators are ideally positioned to solve communication problems and to determine the best delivery method, those same issues are compounded when they are viewed through the dual lens of accessibility and disability. With the increasing use of wireless, expanding global marketplaces, increasing prevalence of technology in our daily lives, and ongoing changes of writing through and with technology, technical communicators need to be acutely aware of issues involved with accessibility and disability.

This collection will advance the field of technical communication by expanding the conceptual apparatus for understanding the intersections among disability studies, technical communication, and accessibility and by offering new perspectives, theories, and features that can only emerge when different fields are brought into conversation with one another.

Intended Audience: Scholars and practitioners of technical communication, disability studies, rhetoric, and usability/user experience. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes in: web design; document design/information design; topics courses in technical communication and disability studies; cultural studies courses in internet or digital culture; introduction to the field of technical communication; research methods; and rhetorical theory.

Further details include the following reviews in praise of the book.

Rhetorical Accessability is an important book, not only because it elucidates a range of critical work being done at the intersection of technical communication and disability studies, but, more importantly, because it demonstrates convincingly how work in these areas—which some still consider highly specialized concerns—directly affects every one of us, every day, whether we know it or not. By foregrounding the productive interplay of theories from disability studies and technical communication, the authors highlight how issues of inclusive content, accessible design, medical discourse, and technological embodiment are at work in all of our daily lives. In so doing, Rhetorical Accessability represents a major step toward a broader field of writing studies, toward work on crucial issues in writing that span personal, academic, civic, and professional discourses, that unite scholars of rhetoric, composition, technical communication, literacy studies, linguistics, and other fields.

Paul Heilker, Director of the PhD in Rhetoric and Writing, Virginia Tech.

On every page, this groundbreaking collection—the first of its kind in the field of technical communication—reminds us that disability studies deserves to play a central role in our pedagogies, workplace practices, and scholarship. Lisa Meloncon has assembled an excellent, wide-ranging collection of chapters from both established experts and new scholars. The topics and theoretical lenses are diverse and broad. The chapters are deeply grounded and well-informed. They combine theory and practice in true tech comm fashion. The coverage of web accessibility is excellent, comprising multiple chapters and topics (e-readers, laws, guidelines, accessibility statements, online writing instruction). I’m already planning to add this book to the list of required readings for my graduate course in Web Accessibility and Disability Studies.”

Sean Zdenek, Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric, Texas Tech University.

I can’t wait to read my copy. Congratulations to Lisa and all involved!

Author’s Draft: Difference on Display Review


Difference on Display Front Cover
The front cover of ‘Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society’. Audio description of the artwork depicted and other artworks from the exhibition is available to download via the DaDaFest webpages.

Back in October my review of Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society was published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

In my blog post introducing the review I promised to share a link to an open access author’s draft. This draft is now available via my publication page on academia.edu.

If you’d like more information about the pros and cons of using and deploying author’s drafts and more detailed analysis on open access publishing and repositories from an academic and institutional perspective I highly recommend reading/following Brian Kelly’s UK Web Focus blog.  His thoughts on the benefits and costs of institutional repositories for example, are both detailed and comprehensive.

Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society


Difference on Display Front Cover
The front cover of ‘Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society’. Audio description of the artwork depicted and other artworks from the exhibition is available to download via the DaDaFest webpages.

This week I received news that my review of Ine Gever’s book Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society has just been published in the latest issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies (vol 6.3).

Here’s the opening gambit:

In 2002 Tom Shakespeare and Nick Watson declared disability to be the “quintessential postmodern concept”; it defies classification because it is “so complex, so variable, so contingent, so situated” (19). Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society exalts this postmodern view, offering the reader a complex and varied response to the shifting frontier between disabled and non-disabled. The book was devised to accompany Niet Normaal: Difference on Display, an exhibition of new and existing artworks by international and contemporary disabled and non-disabled artists, designers, film-makers, and their collaborators. Niet Normaal was conceived in the Netherlands, originally exhibiting in Amsterdam. The exhibition came to the UK in Liverpool as part of the DaDa Fest and the Olympic Games Cultural Programme for London 2012. The result is a book that is part exhibition catalogue and part visual treatise on the ambiguity of the human condition in high modernity. Importantly, the book is also an artefact, a physical object evidencing a world at the margins of media and discourses. As Editor-in-Chief, the activist and curator Ine Gevers states that the artworks depicted express a “visual and non-discursive discourse” (24). This “non-discursive discourse” identifies the process of manifesting what is unsaid in its “brute being” (Foucault 131). Accordingly, diverse cultural products that examine normalcy are gathered to establish a new perspective on the self in society. In this way, Difference on Display asks “what is normal” and “who decides this” from a variety of angles, supplying a welcome resource to viewers/readers across disability studies and related disciplines…

The article is available to academic readers who are registered with Athens. However, for wider audiences the paper is not currently available. In the short term, a substantial extract is available on the articles page in lieu of an abstract.

In the longer term, I will be making a pre-edited draft version available via Pure, the new King’s College London repository. As King’s is currently testing Pure, contents are not externally available, however as soon as this position changes, I will upload my copy to the repository. Ultimately, this will mean that all readers can access an earlier version of the review (prior to editorial input and revisions) in keeping with the Journal’s copyright. I’ll be sure to post here as soon as this version becomes available!

In the meantime, I highly recommend you check out:

Full reference: Lewthwaite, S. (2012) Review: Ine Gevers, “Difference on Display: Diversity in Art, Science and Society”Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability StudiesVol 6. Issue 3. pp. 348 – 351.

Rhetorical AccessAbility Reviews Posted


Rhetorical AccessAbility edited by Lisa MelonconThis post is a second trailer for a new book ‘Rhetorical AccessAbility: At the Intersection of Technical Communication and Disability Studies’, edited by Lisa Meloncon at the University of Cincinnati to be released later this year. I penned a chapter for this book in collaboration with Henny Swan, Senior Accessibility Specialist at the BBC. Together we consider ‘Web Standards and the Majority World’, taking a socio-cultural look at the values that web standards convey to a global audience.  In particular we were interested in examining the ways in which Web Standards can export Minority (that is developed/Northern/post-industrial) notions of disability to the Majority world, with potentially counter-productive results. We make our arguments by attending closely to Web Standards as a form of technical writing through the lens of critical disability studies and research.

Publishers Baywood have listed Rhetorical Accessibility as available for pre-order as part of their Technical Communications Series (Edited by series editor Charles H. Sides). Their pages include the publishers’ book summary and target audience information which I’ve previously blogged about. Further details are now available, however, including the front cover (pictured above), profiles of all the authors and the following reviews in praise of the book.

Rhetorical Accessability is an important book, not only because it elucidates a range of critical work being done at the intersection of technical communication and disability studies, but, more importantly, because it demonstrates convincingly how work in these areas—which some still consider highly specialized concerns—directly affects every one of us, every day, whether we know it or not. By foregrounding the productive interplay of theories from disability studies and technical communication, the authors highlight how issues of inclusive content, accessible design, medical discourse, and technological embodiment are at work in all of our daily lives. In so doing, Rhetorical Accessability represents a major step toward a broader field of writing studies, toward work on crucial issues in writing that span personal, academic, civic, and professional discourses, that unite scholars of rhetoric, composition, technical communication, literacy studies, linguistics, and other fields.

Paul Heilker, Director of the PhD in Rhetoric and Writing, Virginia Tech.

On every page, this groundbreaking collection—the first of its kind in the field of technical communication—reminds us that disability studies deserves to play a central role in our pedagogies, workplace practices, and scholarship. Lisa Meloncon has assembled an excellent, wide-ranging collection of chapters from both established experts and new scholars. The topics and theoretical lenses are diverse and broad. The chapters are deeply grounded and well-informed. They combine theory and practice in true tech comm fashion. The coverage of web accessibility is excellent, comprising multiple chapters and topics (e-readers, laws, guidelines, accessibility statements, online writing instruction). I’m already planning to add this book to the list of required readings for my graduate course in Web Accessibility and Disability Studies.”

Sean Zdenek, Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric, Texas Tech University.

Free Research +1: Enacting Disability by Vasilis Galis


Last week I highlighted Routledge’s online festival of free access to academic journals (to access the journals you have to register on their site, to begin 14 days  of access at any point up until the 30th June 2012). My last post highlighted 19 papers with particular relevance to non-academics working in Education, Disability and Technology, based on a clutch of blog posts that I mustered for a similar festival last year. However, I also promised to highlight more recent research. So, for those of you hungry for the cutting edge – here’s my starter for 10.

Vasilis Galis (2011) “Enacting Disability: how can science and technology studies inform disability studies?”, Disability and Society, 26:1, p 825-838.

I blogged about this paper on the King’s Learning Institute’s Technology Enhanced Learning Blog for blogging against disablism day. This is a highly academic paper, and blog post, concerned with how disability studies and science and technology studies interact. However, I think many readers outside academia will still find something useful within it. Galis uses Actor Network Theory to identify how Disability might be concieved as an interaction, rather than an individual attribute, or external environment.  Below, I reproduce my review from the KLI blog, which draws out particular implications for Technology Enhanced Learning.  Your thoughts, as ever, are welcome. More posts on research from the last 12 months will follow in the next few days!

At the Sharp Edge of Technology Enhanced Learning: Science and Technology and Critical Disability Studies

…This post focuses on what learning technologists and disability scholars have to learn from one another and the importance of encouraging this traffic of ideas to combat digital disablism.

Specifically, I’d like to review a recent paper published in Disability and Society by Vasilis Galis (2011) “Enacting Disability: how can science and technology studies inform disability studies?”. At King’s, increasing interdisciplinary is resulting in new approaches to learning and technology across the College. However, when thinking about disability, much technology research and discussion focuses on accessibility, a fundamental part of user experience and human computer interaction rooted in computer science. In contrast, Disability Studies builds on a critical social science perspectives. Both engage activists, working to make digital experiences more inclusive. However, both accessibility and disability studies represent many diverse understandings of what disability is. When learning experiences are built on the results, for increasingly diverse student groups and interface devices, the picture complicates further.

Galis’ paper identifies theoretical frames from Science and Technology Studies that can  assist in the ordering of disability and the representation of disability issues in different techno-scientific forums (or fora, depending which way you like your latin sliced) to clarify this space. His position has tangible applications for accessibility and Technology Enhanced Learning development.

To begin, Galis argues that:

Dominant conceptual models of disability have produced distinct dichotomies between the body, and semiotic and material entities (Galis, 2011: 826)

To set the scene, Galis reviews the medical model of disability, the social model of disability  and the trajectory of postmodern approaches. He observes that many such lenses on disability rely on unhelpful distinctions (such as individual/social, illness/culture, body/socio-structural environment). Galis proposes a bridging intervention, highlighting the value of Actor Network Theory for promoting an interactional model of disability, in which disability (and impairment) are understood as being co-created between humans and “non-humans”.

Actor Network Theory

Within this model, “non-humans”, be they assistive technologies or other surfaces of technology (a ramp, browser, power supply, internet connection and so forth) and environmental factors, are considered ‘symmetrically’. Galis explains:

Actor Network Theory attempts to cancel the divide between human and non-human actors. In this way, ANT does not privilege impaired bodies (according to a medical model), or socio-material constructions (according to a social model). Instead ANT provides an analysis of a situation which may produce disability or ability (Galis, 2011, 830).

Actor Network Theory, he suggests, expands the vocabulary available to disability researchers and scholars. Importantly, Galis takes time to express criticism of this position, and carefully demarcate its limits.

From Galis’ argument, Actor Network Theory looks like a useful additional lens to those working at the chalk face of disability theory and leveraging the multiple-perspectives that are necessary for any mapping of the complex and contested arena of ‘disability’. However, I’m not sure that a relational model of disability, one that is gaining increasing traction with more critical Accessibility discourse (In my own work, most recently with Martyn Cooper et al. 2012) necessarily requires the vocabulary of Actor Network Theory. Moreover, this position strikes me a falling back into technicist discourses which render power relations invisible. Galis goes into this in some depth, drawing on Foucault and other critical theorists to forefront issues of ‘who is disabled, and who decides’. In this way, he applies a bricolage– recommending a use of ANT in the wild, (Callon, 2003) that produces knowledge through more recognisable emancipatory and participatory research practices, that engage disabled people, rather than foisting hierarchical academic power-relations upon them. This, Galis advises, requires the hard sciences to engage with ‘anti-science’, ‘concerned groups’ (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2003) and ‘hybrid forums’ (Callon, 2003). Beneath the disciplinary jargon, this translates into a more precise, technical vocabulary for Sciences engaging with participatory disability research in the field.

Having undertaken participatory disability research in the wild, from within education (social science) and human factors (engineering), I recognise the strengths of a relational view of disability. By setting this view within an ANT vocabulary and an explicitly political framework, Galis overcomes the criticisms of localism and hegemony. However, I can’t help wondering whether, rather than informing disability studies with Science and Technology Studies, STS itself has instead been tested and developed by a critical engagement with disability?  In any event – the benefits of critically considering disability, and its positioning within Science and Technical disciplines remains a rich seam that demands further investigation to ensure our design, deployment and social use of technology for learning does not “enact disability”.

 

Rhetorical AccessAbility


This post is a trailer for a new book ‘Rhetorical AccessAbility: At the Intersection of Technical Communication and Disability Studies’, edited by Lisa Meloncon at the University of Cincinnati. I penned a chapter for this book in collaboration with Henny Swan. Together we consider ‘Web Standards and the Majority World’, taking a socio-cultural look at the values that web standards convey to a global audience.  In particular we were interested in examining the ways in which Web Standards can export Minority (that is developed/Northern/post-industrial) notions of disability to the Majority world, with potentially counter-productive results. We make our arguments by attending closely to Web Standards as a form of technical writing through the lens of critical disability studies and research. Disability scholars might be interested to know that aspects of this chapter were informed by MMU’s Disability and the Majority World conference, a recently inaugurated event that seeks to globalize disability studies.

Publishers Baywood have now listed Rhetorical Accessibility as available for pre-order as part of their Technical Communications Series (Edited by series editor Charles H. Sides). The publishers’ book summary follows. Further details (including a table of contents and Author information) will become available from Baywood over the next few weeks via the Rhetorical Accessibility pages.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Rhetorical Accessability is the first text to bring the fields of technical communication and disability studies into conversation. The two fields also share a pragmatic foundation in their concern with accommodation and accessibility—that is, the material practice of making social and technical environments and texts as readily available, easy to use, and/or understandable as possible to as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. Through its concern with the pragmatic, theoretically grounded work of helping users interface effectively and seamlessly with technologies, the field of technical communication is perfectly poised to put the theoretical work of disability studies into practice. In other words, technical communication could ideally be seen as a bridge between disability theories and web accessibility practices.

While technical communicators are ideally positioned to solve communication problems and to determine the best delivery method, those same issues are compounded when they are viewed through the dual lens of accessibility and disability. With the increasing use of wireless, expanding global marketplaces, increasing prevalence of technology in our daily lives, and ongoing changes of writing through and with technology, technical communicators need to be acutely aware of issues involved with accessibility and disability.

This collection will advance the field of technical communication by expanding the conceptual apparatus for understanding the intersections among disability studies, technical communication, and accessibility and by offering new perspectives, theories, and features that can only emerge when different fields are brought into conversation with one another.

Intended Audience: Scholars and practitioners of technical communication, disability studies, rhetoric, and usability/user experience. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate classes in: web design; document design/information design; topics courses in technical communication and disability studies; cultural studies courses in internet or digital culture; introduction to the field of technical communication; research methods; and rhetorical theory.

Vic Finkelstein Wikipedia Entry


Wikipedia
Wikipedia

Yesterday I heard the sad news of the recent death of disability activitst and writer, Vic Finkelstein.   To those who knew him and have been touched by his work, this is a huge loss.  At present, there seem to be few indications that Vic will receive the high-profile national obituary that his reputation demands (although I hope to be proved wrong). [Update 6 Dec 2011: Mike Oliver has indicated that obituaries are planned for the Independent and Guardian]. [Update 19 Dec 2011: The Independent: Vic Finkelstein Obituary, update 22 Dec 2011: The Guardian: Vic Finkelstein Obituary].

In an attempt to make Vic’s huge contribution to disability studies and the disabled people’s movement available to a wider audience I’ve begun a wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Finkelstein.  Vic was a pioneer and stalwart of the disabled people’s movement, his life story is testament to this. As Colin Barnes has stated – his contribution to disability studies was unprecedented.  This is a very basic page by no means a sufficient reflection of Vic’s life and work.  In this respect, the page would benefit greatly from other people’s contributions. Wikipedia is collaborative, so I hope that you will consider contributing to the Vic Finkelstein wikipedia entry.

You can edit the page yourself directly if you create an account with wikipedia. However, if you are not familiar with wikis, do not wish to register, or find wikipedia inaccessible (notably I had to complete a visual CAPTCHA to publish the initial page), please send text, specific edits and additional references to me directly and I will try to enter them on your behalf.  You can contribute via email to selewthwaite at gmail dot com, or by commenting below.

Disability, Governmentality and Social Media. Feat. MIA


I’m keen to share resources for scholars in the area of social media, disability studies and education, however, these ‘resources’ are often academic papers or similar. Breaking with usual form, I’d like to introduce the opening track on MIA’s 2010 album MAYA. This song ‘The Message’ uses phrases from the traditional spiritual ‘Dem Bones’ integrating technology, corporations and governments into the connected body parts. The song is short at just under a minute, but there is plenty here for those interested in beginning discussions of biopower and governmentality in cultural studies and/or critical approaches to science and technology with students. To clarify: I’m not reproducing this with a focus on literal consipiracy. I want to highlight the ways in which our understandings of our physical selves are shaped by the quantifying aspects of technology and business, and how these shaping forces tally with with governmental (and medical and academic) projects that imbue life with statistical significance.  I’ll be publishing more in this area soon, please keep an eye on my ‘publications‘ page for more info.

I have copied and annotated the lyrics (copyright MIA) in lieu of subtitles.

The Message

[intro sound of typing on keyboard, followed by layering of abrasive sampled beats and an effects-laden vocal sample/echo that is looped throughout the song]

Connected to the Google
Connected to the government

[lead male vocal]

Headbone connected to the neckbone
Neckbone connected to the armbone
Armbone connected to the handbone
Handbone connected to the internet connected to the Google connected to the government.

[sample] Connected to the Google
Connected to the government

Headbone connects to the headphones
Headphones connect to the iPhone
iPhone connected to the internet connected to the Google connected to the government

[sample] Connected to the Google
Connected to the government