A Adam
Disability and discourses of web accessibility
Adam, A; Kreps, DGP
Authors
DGP Kreps
Abstract
Much of the World Wide Web remains inaccessible or difficult to access by people across a spectrum of disabilities and this may have serious implications for the potential use of the web for increasing social inclusion. We argue that the complexities of web accessibility are best analysed against a set of relevant discourses and that part of the reason for the obduracy of web inaccessibility lies in crucial gaps in engagement of these discourses, so that there is no clear avenue through which disabled people can engage effectively with the web accessibility issue to ensure their rights are met. We characterize the relevant discourses in terms of the digital divide discourse, the social construction of disability discourse, focusing on the historical relationship between disability and technology, the legal discourse where we briefly describe the burdens which disability discrimination demands of those who design websites and the web accessibility discourse, including a discussion of the development of web accessibility standards. We argue that there are crucial gaps in engagement of these discourses, signalling that important groups are not engaged with the dominant policy making agenda. Notably disability activists are not included in the standard making agenda of the web accessibility movement. Unless ways of including such groups can be found, we argue that the current state of web accessibility and hence the potential for social inclusion to be increased is unlikely to be ameliorated.
Citation
Adam, A., & Kreps, D. (2009). Disability and discourses of web accessibility. Information, Communication and Society, 12(7), 1041-1058. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180802552940
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Jan 1, 2009 |
Deposit Date | Nov 8, 2011 |
Journal | Information Communication and Society |
Print ISSN | 1369-118X |
Publisher | Routledge |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 12 |
Issue | 7 |
Pages | 1041-1058 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180802552940 |
Publisher URL | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691180802552940 |
Downloadable Citations
About USIR
Administrator e-mail: library-research@salford.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search