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Reviewed by:
  • Disability and New Media by Katie Ellis and Mike Kent
  • Alan Foley (bio)
Katie Ellis and Mike Kent, Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011. Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture Series. isbn 9780415871358. Xii + 172 pp. $118.23

The potential of technology to connect people and provide a means of access to education, commerce, employment, and entertainment has never been greater or more rapidly changing. Communication technologies and new media promise to “revolutionize our lives” by breaking down barriers (Goggin and Newell xiii) and expanding access for disabled people. Technology is frequently characterized as liberating – making up for social, educational, and physical barriers to full participation in society. Often viewed in these utopian ways, technology promises to liberate us from the confines of embodiment and provide us with a futuristic antidote for impairment. Through technological advancements, disability would simply fade away or become a largely inconsequential difference.

Early in Disability and New Media, Katie Ellis and Mike Kent note their goal of building on Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell’s (2003) influential work on the social construction of disability in technology and new media. Disability and New Media is thus an exploration of the issues surrounding access to Internet-based technologies and the “significance and potential of the social construction of accessibility” (1). Ellis and Kent contend that “Web 2.0” and user-generated content demand the participation of all users to be successful. Ellis and Kent suggest the possibility of a future in which Internet technologies are clearly aligned with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s belief that “the power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect” (1).

The book’s eight chapters are divided into three sections. Part I discusses universal design, web accessibility, and the accessibility of new media devices and formats (e.g., mobile devices like iPads and their associated software). This section of the book provides the foundation from which the rest of the book is drawn.

Part II explores the evolution of digital technology with attention paid to the contrast of Universal Design and Internet accessibility standards. These [End Page 347] standards are the basis for most accessibility policy and practice. Like most policy and standards, web accessibility standards are not created in, and do not exist in, a vacuum. These standards are interpreted and implemented within particular discursive understandings of ability and disability. That is, social prejudices are often simply reproduced in the digital world.

Part III considers possibilities for the digital world and disability, and suggests broad trends the authors see emerging. The important issues taken up in this section are the economic, ideological, and legal barriers to digital media that threaten access more than technological limitations. For example, in the case of the Amazon Kindle, features in the device that could speak book text and afford access for people with disabilities were removed because of concerns that, because computerized speech is improving in quality, this feature could limit the sale of traditional audio books to non-disabled readers.

A challenge in writing about the effects of technology is balancing the need for specific examples with the risk of losing the impact of the analysis to obsolescence given the rapid evolution of technology. Ellis and Kent approach this tension by using specific, contemporary technologies such as Twitter, Facebook, and the iPad1 to illustrate how socially constructed disabling features from the analog world are too often reproduced in the digital context. That is, technology is always subject to the limitations of the values of those who design, implement, and maintain it. For example, as social networking sites continue to become ubiquitous in our daily lives, so too does the cost of exclusion from these contexts, whether that exclusion is based on social, educational, economic, or technological barriers. In what is increasingly a dynamic, user-generated, visual, multimedia, and interactive space, accessibility concerns tend to follow on the heels of innovation, “rather than being an integral part of their roll out” (Ellis and Kent 15). Weighted down by lengthy development processes, standards promote approaches that lag behind broader technological change. Ellis and Kent note, “While accessibility...

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