Things are official, so I wanted to announce that my husband, Sean Duncan, and I will be starting as assistant professors at Indiana University this fall. I will be in the Department of Communication and Culture, and Sean will join the Learning Sciences program. I’m particularly excited about joining an interdisciplinary program, with fantastic colleagues, that brings together film and media studies with rhetoric and performance and ethnography studies. My mixed methods dissertation seems quite at home in that context. I’m also eager to be part of a campus wide community of people doing exciting research around media technology and its roles in our lives.

We’ll be moving to Bloomington this summer. My family couldn’t be happier that we’re staying in the midwest, and the thrill of finding academic positions together can’t be overstated. We feel very lucky that things worked out for us as well as they did.

Fall is my favorite time of year, but this fall is also perhaps the busiest. In between teaching, working on my dissertation, and getting settled in a new place, I’ve been thinking and writing quite a bit about closed captions and online video. The results of that will be published in Television & New Media before too much longer, and I suggest reading this piece by Joe Clark for an interesting primer in the mean time. Or, for the more hardcore policy types, read the latest news on the Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.

Happy as I am to be done with that article, if I had seen Rhett and Link‘s “Caption Fail” videos before I wrote it, there would have been much more entertaining examples of poor auto-captioning than the ones I pulled from YouTube and PBS videos.

Gastritis. Cat.

After taking last week off for US Thanksgiving, I’m not going to manage a substantive blog post here this week, either. I’m taking off for Ohio later today, where tomorrow I’ll be giving a talk about the concept of “participatory media” and disability and online accessibility. And it’s a busy week, because I’ll also have a post going up on Friday at the end of In Media Res’ week on Disability in the Media. My piece builds on some of what I’ve already written about Fable 3’s segment “The Blindness,” but so far, pieces by Katie Ellis and Bill Kirkpatrick have also been really thought-provoking.

And, I can’t say enough good things about s.e. smith’s post on accessibility/usability in website design. The comments are really interesting, as well, pointing to the general lack of accessibility education and implementation in web professions and among casual users.

Looking through my Google reader I saw that the National Federation of the Blind has filed a wide-ranging complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights over a number of accessibility failures at Penn State University. NFB argues that civil rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act are being violated, given the inaccessibility of PSU’s websites – including the Office of Disability Services – as well as their online course management software (Angel) and assorted other campus technologies. Coming less than a year after the settlement of suits regarding Kindle use at Arizona State and elsewhere, it’s depressing to see that the issues surrounding technology and accessibility have still not filtered through higher education to become central parts of technological development, licensing, or innovation.

Though many of the cited failures of accessibility are fairly common problems, it is their complaint about “smart” podiums that drew my attention. The touchscreen podiums in classes on campus do not have alternate means of interaction, leaving blind faculty dependent on others to control the lighting, multimedia presentations, microphone volume and other features of the wired classroom. I use similar podiums for teaching at my own university, and will be looking to see whether they offer alternative means of interaction when I’m back in the classroom on Monday.

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, there are hopes that this suit could be resolved in such a way that “Penn State and the Education Department would develop a template for accessible technology that could be adopted by other colleges.” Certainly, the Kindle suit resulted in a number of changes regarding pilot programs with e-readers, and commitments to only attempt to reinstate e-reader programs with technology that was more accessible, as well as a strong warning to other colleges. Though it’s lamentable that this is necessary, twenty years after the ADA, these cases are exactly the kind of potentially broad-ranging challenges that could strengthen the civil rights protections of the ADA and the accessibility processes used in US institutes of higher education.

In other ADA news, however, there was a hearing held today about the impact of instituting ADA compliance for small businesses. Check out the Justice for All blog for more details.

Via @AccessibleTwitr, I saw that today is World Usability Day, and this year’s focus is on the importance of usability to communication. Now, of course, usability is not the same as accessibility; it is focused on ease of general use, for a mass audience. And, usability doesn’t always incorporate a universal design perspective in which the needs of those who face the most challenges are centered, with the understanding that products designed for that group may also be more usable by others.

That said, usability and communication is an interesting theme, as it seems to implicitly tie back to media accessibility in particular. In the Usability Day Charter, organizers suggest that usability is relevant at many levels – government, health, interpersonal communication – including entertainment:

But, even amusement benefits from usability! Incomprehensible remote controls, confusing instructions and blinking VCR clocks speak to the need for improvement in our media. Usable entertainment systems will make the experience less tiring and frustrating.

Interestingly, this section on entertainment is written about some fairly old new media – television and VCRs – but doesn’t touch on whether there might be usability issues with radio, film, recorded music, or other forms of entertainment media. Even apart from that, there’s quite a lot to unpack here – the charter is implicitly talking about hardware (remote controls) and a kind of literacy (confusing instructions), but it doesn’t really address software in terms of menus, navigation options and other features of digital television. What about the need for usability in online or other new media entertainment contexts? In streaming video? In content downloads? Or the usability issues of computers and the internet themselves? A recent study showed that 90% of users don’t know what a browser’s “Back” button does. Or, what about the need for greater usability in video games, many of which are no longer even particularly legible on a standard definition television? In essence – why has entertainment been defined in such a limited way, erasing many other fronts on which usability might become particularly salient.

In a separate article, the Charter addresses “communication,” this year’s theme:

We have more means than ever to communicate: phones, Internet, messaging and the printed medium. Technology that facilitates communication between people must be intuitive to use. It should have instructions that are easy to understand, and knobs, dials and buttons that do not require constant tuning.

This at least includes newer new media, but it seems to once again ignore the level of software; knobs, dials, and buttons each get a call-out, as do instructions once again, but the interfaces, code, and specific functionalities are left out. Now, perhaps this is done in the interest of generality, as the Charter is a statement of intent more than any comprehensive agenda. But I find it somewhat troubling to see the persistent focus on only the physical elements of devices, especially as more and more of them incorporate digital forms of interaction and production.

Insofar as these “usability” issues with the code, interfaces, and functionalities of new media are being discussed and addressed, it seems to be happening under the mantle of “accessibility,” as with the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which includes measures to simplify buttons on remote controls, increase captioning capacity on new technologies, and so on. Potentially, this could suggest that features designed for accessibility will be mainstreamed through their effect in increasing usability; a kind of universal design, whether intended or not, perhaps. And, of course, there are web usability professionals, like Jakob Nielsen and others, who have written extensively on making the web and its interfaces and code more usable. Many of these advocates incorporate accessibility into their usability work, as in the second edition of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!. Still, for World Usability Day to seem so digitally barren surprised me, and continues to push my thinking about how these issues overlap.

PS – The World Usability Day site has a pretty neat feature in which you can highlight some text and click on a pop-up to have it read to you (by a screenreader voice).

I’ve been binging on Fable 3 for the past week or so (with a break for the XBox downloadable Costume Quest, which is adorable and Halloween-themed). I loved Fable 2, with its pastoral settings, funny reversals of some video game conventions, and a pretty straightforward hero’s journey that you could more or less ignore in order to become a master welder, marry a bunch of villagers of either sex, or go on all kinds of side quests.

Fable 3 is, in many ways, less satisfying than Fable 2, precisely because its ambitions are higher. Moving the story to the Industrial Revolution, asking the player to stage a coup, and then  to govern the kingdom of Albion should be an opportunity to expand and deepen the choices and effects that the player can make. Instead, the choices remain frustratingly binary – do I repair these buildings now, or let them crumble forever? There won’t be an opportunity to revisit this later! In fact, past the halfway point of the game, I never felt like I was allowed off of the rails; it’s an amusement park ride, not a piece of interactive fiction. Michael Abbott details a lot of the disappointments with the game better than I can do here.

That said, I was pretty captivated by the initial scenes in the region of Aurora:

The use of blindness – whether sand blindness or a magically-induced psychological or physical blindness – in this segment is unusual in that it actually brings up disability in a game that otherwise shies away from it. Designer Peter Molyneux always promises that players’/avatars’ actions and choices will change their avatars – in Fable 2, my poor fighting skills meant my avatar was covered in battle scars and scratches – but the games consistently avoid any real incapacity. My poor fighting skills should have meant that one of those mercenaries would permanently injure me by slicing off my arm or something, or my stamina should have decreased, or something.

My next quest is a return to Aurora, so I suspect that I will continue to think about the use of disability and avatarial embodiment in Fable 3 over the next few weeks!

Considering that the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (which needs a shorter name – 21CCVAA?) is likely to be a landmark communications and civil rights law, and will also be seriously important to my dissertation research, I’ve thrown out all of my previous plans for today to focus on creating a bit of a web archive on this particular moment for later analysis. I’m going through news, downloading full text of various versions of the bill, spending a lot of time in Thomas.gov, going through information on the House and Senate bills. And watching Step Up 2: The Streets.

I started by bookmarking and downloading this White House video of the signing, which is really worth watching in full:

Also, I realize that I haven’t mentioned Rosa’s Law here – signed by Obama earlier this week, this replaces the phrase “mental retardation” in federal laws with the phrase “intellectual disability,” a notable step in attempts to move away from stigmatizing language.

That’s all – back to web searching and archiving and annotating and all that good stuff.

Earlier today, Beth Haller posted some highlights of her 2010 survey of PWD regarding media representations. (Full disclosure: I talked with Haller about this months ago, and was encouraged to participate despite not identifying as a PWD, so I’m probably in these results somewhere). It’s a little stats-heavy for this humanist to totally understand, in parts, but the takeaways are generally very interesting.

First, the most-viewed recent entertainment media with disability content were:

• Extreme home makeover (2003-present)
• House (2004-present)
• Finding Nemo (2002)
• Little people, Big world (2006-2010)
• Monk (2002-2009)

Of these, all considered at least somewhat “empowering” representations of disability, Little People, Big World was rated most empowering. Considering my own, and others’, misgivings about the direction of much of TLC’s reality programming – more medical conditions, more multiple births, now even more wives – it’s heartening to see that at least some of this programming is resonant with an audience of PWDs. Haller goes on, though to note that older texts, such as “A beautiful mind, Sesame Street, and Children of a Lesser God all scored as having even more empowering representations than Little People, Big World.”

Haller and Zhang also analyze the survey results in respect to news coverage, respondents’ attention to media, and respondents’ identifications with disability. For my own purposes, their invocation of Clogston and Haller’s frames seems like a possibly productive way of doing initial forms of content analysis, should I ever decide to go in that direction:

Clogston and Haller’s traditional categories include:
• The Medical Model — Disability is presented as an illness or malfunction. Persons who are disabled are shown as dependent on health professionals for cures or maintenance.
• The Social Pathology Model — People with disabilities are presented as disadvantaged and must look to the state or to society for economic support, which is considered a gift, not a right.
• The Supercrip Model — The person with a disability is portrayed as deviant because of “superhuman” feats (i.e. ocean-sailing blind man) or as “special” because they live regular lives “in spite of” disability (i.e. deaf high school student who plays softball).
• The Business Model — People with disabilities and their issues are presented as costly to society and businesses especially. Making society accessible for disabled people is not really worth the cost and overburdens businesses, i.e. accessibility is not profitable.

Clogston and Haller’s progressive categories include:
• The Minority/Civil Rights Model — People with disabilities are portrayed as members of the disability community, which has legitimate political grievances. They have civil rights that they may fight for, just like other groups. Accessibility to society is a civil right.
• The Cultural Pluralism Model — People with disabilities are presented as a multi-faceted people and their disabilities do not receive undue attention. They are portrayed as non-disabled people would be.
• The Legal Model — The media explain that it is illegal to treat disabled people in certain ways. The Americans with Disabilities Act and other laws are presented as legal tools to halt discrimination.

The Business Model in particular is a framing that I haven’t heard in many other places, and that is particularly relevant to talking about web accessibility (as are the more familiar progressive categories), as this is often exactly how professional literature presents accessibility in relation to more commonplace web development practices. Or, more accurately, professional literature often brings up a business model and follows it with what could be called social pathology language, making a moral argument at the heels of a business argument.

Finally, as I recall, Glee was not included on the survey as an instance of entertainment media that deals with disability. It is, however, at the forefront of my thoughts today. This week’s episode, “Grilled Cheesus,” featured yet another instance of Jean, Sue’s sister with Down’s Syndrome, appearing in conversation and in person only to lend depth of character to Sue. Sue’s atheism is presented as based on righteous anger over her sister’s disability, and Jean herself appears once again at the end of an episode to provide an opportunity for Sue to reflect on her beliefs, as Jean admits her belief in God. Still, Jean does not have a story of her own, or much depth of characterization, and given Glee‘s previous uses of PWD to teach lessons to main characters (as in “Laryngitis“), I am not optimistic that this representation will see much growth in future episodes. More forgiving takes on “Grilled Cheesus” can be found at Antenna and Cultural Learnings, but I think it’s important to point out the laziness and representational politics of confining Jean to scenes in which she is used to illustrate an otherwise unseen element of Sue’s characterization.

It’s also great timing – I’ll be presenting at Flow Conference 2010 this weekend, as part of a roundtable on media policy, and I was using captioning as my key example of how academics can engage with policy. My full response paper (written before today’s news) behind the jump! (more…)

Just a quick post, because Anna at FWD/Forward says it all better than I could. I’ve never actually watched the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon, closely tied to Jerry Lee Lewis, who hosted the event for many years. A number of people with disabilities have strongly criticized Lewis, the telethon, and the representations of people with disability that are included in the program. For instance, Laura Hershey describes her dissatisfaction with Lewis and the telethon in this clip from “It’s Our Story:”

Transcript, since the YouTube captions are wonky:

Laura: That’s actually a group that was started in Chicago by Mike Irvin, Chris Matthews, and several other people. And I worked with them a lot organziing these protests nationally. I think what the name says is that Jerry Lewis doesn’t have the right to claim us as his quote “kids”, especially as he’s not interested in our perspective. He completely trashes people who question or challenge the telethon approach. He’s attacked us in the press, calling us ungrateful, claiming that he bought us our wheelchairs which is, you know, completely untrue.

You know, whatever ego trip he gets thinking of himself as our saviour, or our daddy, or whatever it is he thinks, we reject that.

We’re not his kids, we’re adults, and we’re our own people. We don’t belong to him.

This activism around Lewis and the telethon resulted in protests at last year’s Oscars, as PWD objected to Lewis’ honorary Award. For an interesting summary and analysis of that event, I recommend Beth Haller’s new book, Representing Disability in an Ableist World.