Blog Post #7: Shades of Access

In Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam J. Banks illustrates the ways in which access to technology is immersed in issues of race and racism. For Banks, existing discourses around access to technology fail to account for more systemic considerations about race and racism insofar as these discourses assume that proximity or material access to technologies is effectively all there is to understanding and practicing access. In giving more dialogic space to these systemic considerations within conversations in and about access to technology, Banks calls for more critically informed approaches to such conversations, approaches that ultimately problematize the notion that African Americans are somehow fundamentally "non-technological" (12), and contest the sort of "user-friendly racism" (45) that is programmed into the very foundation of what comprises technology access and use. In this sense, Banks calls for more studied, inclusive, and robust considerations of "African American rhetoric" and "Black Digital Ethos," considerations that promote a "larger, macrolevel awareness" (67) of design components that structure and overdetermine race relations inside and outside of various technological interfaces. Ultimately, a focus on such design components, in Banks' estimation, not only reveals underlying assumptions and prescribed uses and abuses embedded in technologies, but also provides more space to individuals to position themselves against overbearing and totalizing systems and structures that support and enable tacit racist activities in both the real world and cyberspace.

In an effort to provide a better understanding of Banks' project and overall argument in Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, I have selected three quotes that might help flesh out the critical ground he is attempting to navigate throughout the text:

1) ". . . more than mere artifacts, technologies are the spaces and processes that determine whether any group of people is able to tell its own stories on its own terms, whether people are able to agitate and advocate for policies that advance its interests, and whether that group of people has any hope of enjoying equal social, political, and economic relations." (10)

2) "All technologies come packaged with a set of politics: if those technologies are not inherently political, the conditions in which they are created and in which they circulate into a society are political and influence their uses in that society (Winner, 1986), and those politics can profoundly change the spaces in which messages are created, received, and used." (23)

3) "These debates all carry assumptions about what constitutes access to computers, the Internet, or any digital technology that, even when guided by the best of intentions, threaten disaster if not addressed. This danger exists because those assumptions will guide legal, corporate, and educational policies that can trap Black people into roles as passive consumers of technologies rather than producers and partners, and worse, lead to continued electronic invisibility and economic, educational, and political injustice." (31)

While Banks certainly raises a number of important issues in these quotes and throughout Race, Rhetoric, and Technology, there were two issues in particular that really stood out to me during my reading:

1) In an effort to provide a more potent and substantive vocabulary for engaging in discourses in and around access to technology, Banks references four prospective lenses through which to understand the shades and dynamics of access: material access, functional access, experiential access, and critical access. Meaningful access refers to the prospects for "equality in the material conditions that drive technology use or nonuse" (41). Functional access refers to "the knowledge and skills necessary to use those tools [technologies] effectively" (41). Experiential access refers to a brand of access that "makes the tools [technologies] a relevant part of their lives" (42). Critical access refers to the ways in which individuals might engage with technologies in such a way that they become "intelligent users and producers of technology," a position through which access comes to "mean more than mere ownership of or proximity to random bits of plastic and metal" (42). Insofar as these lenses provide a more robust and inclusive vernacular for discussing issues of access to technology, they serve as valuable mediums through which to further complicate and nuance matters of access beyond traditional emphases on proximity to technologies.

2) In placing a particular emphasis on alternatives to proximity to technologies in discourses in and around access to technologies, Banks locates a measure of liberatory potential in the design components of the technologies we use and navigate on a daily basis. In this sense, Banks suggests that "the most important work we can do on behalf of our students is not knowledge work or critical work, but design work, work in creating the spaces in which they will communicate" (84). By keeping design components at the forefront of considerations about access to technology, Banks frees students up to visualize and enact the prospects for freely navigating and contesting the systems in which they are embedded.

"B.O.B.B.Y." by RZA

Blog Post #6: Dis(abilities) and "AccessFirst Design"

This past week the readings for class pertained to the ways in which individuals with disabilities are or are not served and/or represented in online and classroom spaces. Though the readings by Yergeau et al. and Dolmage were certainly robust, engaging, and accessible, I will focus on Slatin's "The Imagination Gap: Making Web-based Instructional Resources Accessible to Students and Colleagues with Disabilities" in the blog post that follows.

Slatin's main argument revolves around the idea of "AccessFirst Design." Within this idea, he is primarily concerned with issues of accessibility as they intersect with the organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Throughout the essay, Slatin places an emphasis on how the very foundation of Web pages and digitized, Internet-based information, is structured in such a way as to exclude and foreclose upon participation by individuals with disabilities. Many Web-based resources fail, in his estimation, because issues of accessibility were not addressed or considered at the nascent stages of the Internet's emergence nor in the subsequent stages in which the Internet gathered steam and acquired users without significant disabilities or obstacles. Slatin therefore proposes "AccessFirst Design" to remediate upon issues of narrow and prejudiced accessibility, a potent lens and discursive framework through which to rightfully expand the scope and reach of Web-based resources.

In my reading, I found three quotes/references to the text particularly important for understanding Slatin's project and overall argument:

1) "Rhetoric is all about knowing your audience, understanding what information audience members are likely to possess already, what beliefs they hold, and what might move them to the action or the change of belief we're calling for. Underlying all this is the fundamental conviction that members of that audience can read and understand and make appropriate responses. We also should extend that expectation to audience members who have disabilities." (7)

2) "Why should accessibility have to be hidden? When I say that good design is accessible design, I mean that it's not enough to make a site "look good" and then "add accessibility": That's like adding wheelchair ramps to existing buildings where it's convenient for the architects and engineers, not the people who need to go in and out. It's good to have that ramp, but for a person in a hand-propelled chair it's a whole lot better if the slope meets the specifications in the ADA Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG): one inch of rise for every foot of length (the ADAAG is available on the U.S. Access Board Web site; specifically, see http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#4.8) - ). And it would be even better if the ramp led to the front door instead of going in through the loading-dock. Accessibility isn't additive: it's integral." (11)

3) "The first item in both the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and the Section 508 federal standards calls upon Web-authors to provide "equivalent alternatives" for all visual and auditory material on a site. For images, this typically involves adding an ALT attribute to the HTML image (IMG) element; the ALT attribute specifies a short text--a phrase or perhaps a sentence--that replaces the image for people who can't see it (whether because they're blind or because they're using a text-only display). For richer, more complex images such as photographs, works of art, charts, or graphs, it may be necessary to use an additional attribute, LONGDESC, to provide a "long description" of the image as well as the ALT attribute that provides an "equivalent" for the image or the function that the image serves." (24)

From anticipating an audience's existing values, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses; to ensuring that structures and design components are more accessible and inclusive; to making it a point to provide "equivalent alternatives" to individuals with disabilities; the ideas that emerge from the aforementioned quotes and Slatin's project and overall argument continuously touch on two issues in particular:

1) Web-based resources that are designed for and with individuals with disabilities in mind are liable to be just as (if not more) effective and aesthetically rich for such marginalized populations as they might be for others. In making this claim, Slatin is responding to prospective counter-arguments against "AccessFirst Design" that might balk at fundamental and structural modifications to existing Web-based resources. Indeed, modifications of this magnitude will demand active and incessant social, cultural, political, and economic commitments that serve as obstacles for those charged with the task of integrating the tenets of "AccessFirst Design" into their Web-based resources as well as those who navigate these Web-based resources. Which is to say that those individuals who freely and easily navigate existing interfaces and Web-based resources might not initially see the value of "AccessFirst Design" if it does not necessarily serve their interests. I mean, at the front of "AccessFirst Design" is the idea that basically every interface and Web-based resource, and thus basically every familiar and "neutral" medium for communication, will be subject to change and overhaul. I do not say this to cast my lot against "AccessFirst Design." Rather, I merely seek to articulate the scope of the changes and modifications that Slatin is suggesting in his essay and the potential windfall these changes and modifications might bring forth.

2) Regardless of the sorts of evaluative and self-serving objections that might emerge from "AccessFirst Design," a salient point in Slatin's project and overall argument, is the fact that it is our ethical and legal obligation to attend to the ways in which the Web-based resources we use and make available, are or are not accessible to the students we are supposed to be serving inside and outside of the classroom. Slatin's references to such ethical and legal implications elucidates upon the fact that individuals with disabilities are a prominent and indelible population within the classrooms that we construct and navigate on a daily basis. The stakes are therefore rather high in terms of how, not when or why, we actually serve individuals with disabilities. I am grateful to Slatin for his brevity and economical approach to representing and fleshing out the intersection between issues of accessibility for individuals with disabilities and organizational and design components of Web-based resources. Ultimately, Slatin was equal parts concerned with selling the reader on the merits and virtues of "AccessFirst Design" as well as the ethical and legal obligations that demand that we as instructors attend to such merits and virtues.

Disability, Art, and the Age of the Internet: Jes Sachse at TEDxTrentUniversity