Description
Book SynopsisHow 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 accessibleuseablefor them.
Restricted Access investigates digital media accessibilitythe processes by which media is made usable by people with particular needsand argues for the necessity of conceptualizing access in a way that will enable greater partici
Trade Review
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 *
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,author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format
