urban digital disability
TRANSCRIPT
Urban Digital Disability
Talk for ‘Digital Media & Disability’ panel, Highway Africa 2015, 30.08-1.09
Gerard Goggin/@ggogginDept of Media & Communication
University of Sydney
majority of world’s population lives in citiesgreat opportunities, terrible inequalitiesmajority of people with disabilities in world live in ‘global south’ (majority world) - how many in cities?‘cities are terrains of struggle’ (Mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa)- ‘our cities are profoundly unequal places’ (Steven Friedman)disability increasingly important urban struggle, esp. in ‘service’ & ‘being part of city’
Are our cities - in Africa & elsewhere - ‘enabling’ rather than ‘disabling’?What about: transport? housing? Work? Welfare? health? Education? - for people with disabilities living in cities?Social, cultural & political participation in the new spaces & polities of cities?What is role of digital media, interacting with these? Where do mobiles fit into the lives of urban dwellers with disabilities?
Roads & highways & transportation is often very difficult for people with disabilities to use & access how do people with disabilities in South Africa - especially in suburban, townships, ‘peri-urban’ & rural areas - afford, access & use local buses? Is there accessible design? ‘overwhelming majority of South African households do not have regular access to any form of motorised transport and that this seriously undermines their ability to participate in key economic and social activities’ (2007/2008 RSA Dept of Transport survey, cited in Karen Lucas, ‘Making the connections between transport disadvantage and the social exclusion of low income populations in the Tshwane Region of South Africa’, Journal of Transport Geography, 2011)
mobile phones & mobile Internet(s) are new, dynamic face of urban media & journalismSo: where is disability in mobiles & mobile Internet? How do we imagine mobiles as if disability mattered?
disability helps us reimagine cities & media
Disability social
culturalpolitical& bodily
disability + mobile tech in everyday life
disability is now recognized as a significant part of social life & life coursedigital technology – esp. computers, the Internet, mobile media, social media, apps, geolocation technologies, and now, ‘smart’ homes, wearable computers, mobilities technologies including driverless cars - have emerged & are being ‘imagined’ as a significant part of the mediascape, cultural infrastructure, social support system, and personal identity and repertoire of many people with disabilities
mobile & mobilities are central to disability & participation, esp. in cities
global rights framework on disability & digital technology
1. UN 2006 Convention on Rights of Persons with Disability (CRPD) includes various provision stipulating elements of communication rights 2. UNESCO, ITU, other UN agencies are incubating & guiding implementation of CRPD in relation to info & comm tech - e.g. 2013 UNESOOpening Up New Avenues for Empowerment
3. key source of expertise is G3ICT, organization set up by UN
barriers to disability mobile & digital participation
The experience of mobile communications of the majority of participants was limited to making calls, receiving calls, sending or receiving SMSs and instant messages. Few participants living in low and very low-income households experience the wide array of communications services and mobile Internet communications that are on offer … largely because price levels are out of alignment with household income levels. -- Luci Abrahams and Kiru Pillay,The Lived Costs of Communications: Experiencing the lived cost of mobile communications in low and very low income households in urban South Africa 2014 R2K/Wits (2015)
‘For persons with disabilities, the gaps in access and usage are much more complex. People with disabilities use the Internet and related technologies at levels approximately half of the rest of the population. The main reason for this is not a lack of interest or education or inclination, but the fact that the Internet is inherently unfriendly to many different kinds of disabilities. These barriers to access and usage vary by type and extent of disability.’
Paul T. Jaeger, Disability and the Internet (2012), p. 2
best known response to disability in digital
technology is web accessibility e.g. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web accessibility standards/guidelines (WAI)But compliance is low
Bigger issues is the narrow account of ‘web accessibility’e.g. critiques of discourses & imaginaries of web accessibility by Adam Krepps, Elizabeth Ellcessor & othersAlso many kinds of impairment & disability experience & issues (intellectual property?) left out e.g. cognitive impairments cf. Peter Blanck, eQuality: The Struggle for Web eQuality by Persons with Cognitive Disabilities (2014)
mobile web given some minor attention, butmobile Internet has many other implications for disability
‘The ecosystem for the accessible mobile landscape is fairly complex, involving the device, carrier, operating system, APIs, applications, and for disabled users, assistive technologies … The combination of these elements makes syncing the rapid changes between them often seem like a moving target’
(Simon Harper, Peter Thiessen, and Yeliz Yesilada eds, 2014, Research Report on Mobile Web Accessibility. W3C WAI Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) Notes. Editors' Draft 8 July 2014, http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/mobile/note/ED-mobile, 2014)
disability as innovation - ‘M-Enabling’
while great inequality in relation to disability & digital tech remains to be faced, a new approach to disability, especially in relation to mobile media, accents innovation– For example, the ‘M-Enabling’ conferences
disability as opportunity for innovative/creative design e.g. Jos Boys, Doing Disability Differently, Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability
what are the histories of mobile technology was imagined in relation to disability?a.k.a. disability’s invention of the mobile phone
… developments in mobile computing and advancements in electronic communication aids for nonspeaking individuals are inherently intertwined through the history of their research, development, commercialization, use, and reuse.
-- Meryl Alper, ‘Augmentative, Alternative, and Assistive: Reimagining the History of Mobile Computing and Disability’ (2015)
Author: ‘Tape Aids for the Blind’, Sign on Main Street, Cape Town, August 2015
Think of the phone and its keyboard as an antique precursor to the always on, always anticipating, environment aware and connected miniaturized personal assistant of the future interacting with your environment.
- Axel Leblois, 3GICT, M-Enabling conference, 2014
Re-imagining mobile participation, via disability
Even now, emphasis is often on mobiles as tool to support & enhance participation of people with disabilities
yet participation is often assumed & framed in narrow ableist terms
failure of imagination: disability as narrow version of participation
widescreen view of equitable access & participation in
cities + disability
right to political and public participation is a key article (29) in UN Convention on Rights of Persons with Disability (CRPD)right to political and public participation interacts with article 21 on freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information (new right to communicate)& article 30 - Participation in cultural life, recreation, leisure and sport
In the event of service disruption [to public transportation], the disabled traveller needs information in an appropriate form about suitable alternative methods of reaching their destination … Mobile phones equipped with cameras can also be used to send visual and location information to a service centre where an operator can then guide the user to their desired destination.
John Gill, “Priorities for Technological Research for Visually Impaired People,” Visual Impairment Research 7 (2005): 59-61.
Using mobile phones they create audio recordings, videos, text and images that are immediately published on the Web. Participants transform these devices into digital megaphones, amplifying the voices of individuals and groups who are often overlooked or misrepresented in the mainstream media.
Antoni Abad, “Communities + Mobile Phones = Collaborative Visions,” http://megafone.net/
Megafone, MONTRÉAL*in/accessible,2012-2014 http://megafone.net/montreal/*Arseli
‘driven by the disability rights movement and fuelled by an understanding of social structures rather than the individual as the point where disability has been activated, there have been attempts to hack cities and streets to retrospective provide access for people with disabilities’
Cake, D & Kent, M 2014, ‘Hacking the City: Disability and Access in Cities Made of Software’ in T. Brabazon (ed.)City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay. Springer, Berlin.
How mobiles are ‘imagined’, design, made & sold - & configured in policy - do not capture the realities, desires, uses of people across the world, especially the emerging mobile internet in urban Africa, Latin America & parts of AsiaCase in point: Facebook’s Internet.org - access to selected websites/services with no data chargesCase in point: public free WiFi is now coming on agenda (e.g. City of Tshwane), b/c it responds to realities of people’s mobile useMobile imaginaries are very narrow when it comes to disability; let alone urban lives of people with disabilities, negotiating city systems, participating in city politics, wishing to thrive, survive & enjoy their citiesLittle media coverage of disability issues in cities - - major issues in journalism & media in coverage & representation of disability
Meryl Alper, Elizabeth Ellcessor, Katie Ellis, and Gerard Goggin. ‘Reimagining the Good Life With Disability: Communication, New Technology, and Humane Connections.’ In Communication and the “Good Life”, edited by Helen (Hua) Wang, 197-212. New York: Peter Lang, 2015, http://hdl.handle.net/2123/13268
Katie Ellis & Gerard Goggin. Disability and the Media (Palgrave, 2015)
Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin. “Disability Media Participation: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Politics” Media International Australia 154 (March 2015): 78-88.
Gerard Goggin. ‘Communication Rights and Disability Online: Policy and Technology after the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS),’ Information, Communication & Society 18.3 (2015): 327-341.
Katie Ellis and Gerard Goggin. ‘Disability, Global Popular Media, and Injustice in the Notorious Trial of Oscar Pistorius,’ 2015, In Disability Media Studies, edited by Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick, forthcoming. OA version: http://hdl.handle.net/2123/13682
Gerard Goggin and Katie Ellis. ‘Doing Justice to Disability: The Upside of TEDx’s Stella Bungle’. The Conversation, 26 May, 2015 Gerard Goggin. ‘O Brave New World’: Disability, Media, and Human Rights’, forthcoming
Further reading