Disability and Digital Television Cultures

Representation, Access, and Reception

Katie Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138800069
• eBook ISBN: 9781317627845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Television
• Index: Social Sciences

Disability and Digital Television Cultures offers an important addition to scholarly studies at the intersection of disability and media, examining disability in the context of digital television access, representation and reception.

Television, as a central medium of communication, has marginalized people with disability through both representation on screen and the lack of accessibility to this medium. With accessibility options becoming available as television is switched to digital transmissions, audience research into television representations must include a corresponding consideration of access. This book provides a comprehensive and critical study of the way people with disability access and watch digital TV. International case studies and media reports are complimented by findings of a user-focused study into accessibility and representation captured during the Australian digital television switchover in 2013-2014. This book will provide a reliable, independent guide to fundamental shifts in media access while also offering insight from the disability community.

It will be essential reading for researchers working on disability and media, as well as television, communications and culture; upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in cultural studies; along with general readers with an interest in disability and digital culture.

1 Introduction

On 26 November 2017, in celebration of National Deaf Week, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) 6pm news bulletin was interpreted live into Australian sign language (Auslan). It was a first-of-its-kind initiative on television that was described in completely different ways by the different players involved. For the ABC, it was an important awareness raising initiative, while VicDeaf, the community group who helped organise it, saw the translation as facilitating access for thousands of Deaf Australians in their first language (ABC News, 2017). Reactions on social media from both Deaf and hearing audiences of the ABC news were positive. For the Deaf community, access like this has been limited.

Seven years prior to this news screening, it was reported that the technological advancements in digital television showed great promise, and while it was ‘not yet capable of adequate signing for television’ (Slater, Astbrink, & Lindström, 2010, p. 13), one day it would be possible to include a closed signing service on television programming. However, this promise did not eventuate and the 2017 ABC news bulletin was the first of its kind. Indeed, while the BBC, the public broadcaster in the UK, does provide some content in sign language (BBC, 2018), for Australian audiences, aside from emergency broadcasts and this one-off celebration of National Deaf Week, the only programme on Australian television purely in Auslan is an ABC Kids show, Sally and Possum. Other examples of Auslan on ABC children’s programming occur only on an ad hoc basis, for example on Playschool and The Wiggles.

Access to television is similarly poor for other Australian audiences with disability. In 2012, the ABC conducted a 12-week trial of audio description – a track of narration which describes the important visual elements of a television show, movie or performance which are included between the lines of dialogue – by offering 14 hours a week of content accessible to its blind and vision-impaired audiences. However, despite positive feedback, the trial has not continued into an ongoing service. In addition, familiar predictions of the transition to digital television offering increased opportunities for improved access for all have, at least in Australia, been somewhat empty. To date Australia remains the only English-speaking nation in the OECD not to offer audio description on television. In addition, audio description is not regulated in Australia and therefore continues to be stigmatised as a costly accessibility feature for a seemingly non-existent television audience.

By comparison, closed captions – a feature that describes the audio components of television in text at the bottom of the screen for audiences who are D/deaf or hard of hearing – first became available on Australian television in the 1980s and are regulated according to the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA) (1992). Historically, captions have been produced for certain programming but have not always been made available on every platform. However, since their inception, quotas governing their use have progressively increased – today all programmes aired on Australian free-to-air primary digital channels must include closed captions, and they are even increasingly being represented as a mainstream tool anybody can use. Nevertheless, despite these advances, accessibility is still an issue. For example, the further transition of digital television towards online programming has yet to see a corresponding availability of captions in that sphere.

Amid all this, there is a lack of understanding amongst the wider population of what these barriers actually mean to Australians with disability who require these accessibility features to fully enjoy television. Indeed, these groups are often framed within Australian popular culture and cultural identity not as at a disadvantage but rather as battlers, as people who are ultimately responsible for overcoming trials and adversary through a positive personal attitude. An Aussie battler perseveres despite the inhospitable environment and odds stacked against them.

Disability advocate Quentin Kenihan personified the Aussie battler in his early life. Throughout the 1980s, he appeared in both documentaries and a current affairs programming documenting his experiences with osteogenesis imperfecta and his family’s desire that he learn to walk. Quentin, who has long been considered a source of inspiration to the Australian public, appeared as Corpus Colossus in the blockbuster movie Mad Max: Fury Road. Quentin described the movie was a turning point away from the Aussie Battler identity imposed on him from his youth:

I’m not known as ‘that brave little boy’ anymore … people say ‘That’s that dude from the movie’…. I’m not just seen as a person in a wheelchair but as an actor, which is what I’ve always wanted.

(Mott & Dillon, 2018)

Australian actress Kate Hood takes aim at the inhospitable environment stacked against disabled actors in Australia. Hood had starred in the iconic Australian series Prisoner during the 1970s; however, after acquiring a disability in 2002, she was not sent on an audition until 2016 (Clements, 2015). In the interim, she became an activist and established the diversity committee of the Australian actors union Equity. She describes her vision for an Australian media inclusive of disability:

In my ideal world, there would be a level playing field within our profession. We would see people with disabilities studying at drama schools, writing for television, directing for stage and film. It would be common place for the Australian public to see actors who were genuinely disabled on our stages and screens.

(Hood, 2015)

While Aussie Battlers are seen in a number of programs, it is typical to also find nondisabled actors portraying disabled characters in the way Hood describes above. In contrast to this tendency, following her work on Equity, Hood was cast on the iconic Australian soap opera Neighbours. Celebrating the casting on her Facebook page, Hood wrote ‘At last, a major Australian TV series, which is seen globally, has taken the step of casting a disabled actor to play a disabled person’ (Dow, 2016). Unfortunately authenticity in casting and disability diversity is still rare in the Australian television context.

The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities (UNCRPD) recognises the importance of television to the human rights of disabled people. According to this convention, people with disability have a human right to be able to access television (Article 30) and encourage ‘all organs of the media to portray persons with disabilities in a manner consistent with the purpose of the… Convention’ (Article 8) (United Nations, 2006). Therefore, both representation on and access to television are an important site for analysis in disability studies. However, television, as a central medium of communication, has historically marginalised disabled people through both representation on screen and the lack of accessibility to this medium (Goggin & Newell, 2003). Therefore, in order to advance a social understanding of television’s role in disability as a complex identity involving both physical difference and social stigma, it is important to consider both representation and access in the same study. While disability analysis within media studies has historically focused on representation and the way this is shaped by policy and history, more recent theorisation recognises the mutually important area of access to digital platforms. Further, while it is true that accessibility options are becoming increasingly available – and normalised – as television transitions to digital formats, audience research into television representations must include a corresponding consideration of access. Technological creation is a social process in which disability is implicated in a set of social relations of power influenced by public policy and commercial decisions (Goggin & Newell 2003).

As such, Disability and Digital Television Cultures is a book about both representation and access and how these relate to television and disability. Yet how do we define television or even disability today? At some point in time, we would have been able to say with some certainty what both were and what both meant, yet this is no longer the case. For example, in the post-World War II period, television was seen as having a social function, it brought people together into the same space to watch a programme (Spigel, 1992). Towards the end of the 20th century, however, theorists saw this social function as operating in the domain of culture rather than physical space (Lorié, 2011; Newcomb & Hirsch, 1994). Others argued that television was a privatised and individualised experience rather than a social and collective one (Rodan, 2009) and only gave the illusion of being social (Bugeja, 2005; Hoynes, 1994). Television is so much more than an aesthetic object that sits in our lounge room addressing us as though we are a homogenous mass audience – television could now also mean our phones, or computers, or light projected onto the wall or, indeed, that aesthetic object in the lounge room. Beyond technology, television also refers to content, and this content is not targeted to a mass audience anymore. Instead, audiences are targeted as niche because, once combined, they now rival the traditional mass audience. More recently, the integration of social media with traditional forms of television viewing has seen a resurgence of claims that television is a social experience (Hartley, 2010; Vance, 2010; Williams, 2009).

This notion of television as a social function is discussed in detail by Toby Miller, who observes three major scholarly topics of enquiry taken to the study of television across all disciplines. First, he considers the political economy of television via an investigation of television as a technology and who owns and controls it. For example, whereas Marxist critiques focus on the control the bourgeois media has over socio-political agendas, neoliberal approaches espouse the agency of media proprietors while endorsing limited state regulation. Second, the content of television, its textuality, is a key area of focus which can be further divided into content analysis, or identifying patterns across many texts, and the study of hermeneutics, which connects meanings of particular texts to wider socio-cultural environments. Finally, Miller argues that television audiences or publics are subject to scholarly analysis regarding both damaging media effects and celebrations of audience agency (Miller, 2010).

Miller further delineates these areas of scholarly focus into three clear stages which he describes as television studies 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 (Miller, 2010). Television studies 1.0 was concerned with the damaging effects of television and the totalising influence of television studios. This first era of television studies focused on production and the industry. Television studies 2.0, however, is characterised by a shift in focus from the influence of the industry to the agency of the audience. These traditions led to an environment by the end of the 1980s, whereby research focused on a specific area:

It was generally agreed that the cultural and political function of the media could be assessed productively at the level of representation: precisely because the media ‘mediated’ between competing interests and sources of power, the analysis of texts revealed the negotiations of meanings required.

(Turner, 2016)

Miller posits the final era, television studies 3.0, as a way to bring together the disparate approaches to television – ethnographic, political, economical, environmental and geographical – into a comprehensive approach to the study of television. As he explains:

Taking its agenda from social movements as well as intellectual ones, Television Studies 3.0’s methods will draw on economics, politics, communications, sociology, literature, law, science, medicine, anthropology, history, environmental science, and art, with a particular focus on gender, race, class, religion, age, region, and sexuality in everyday life across national lines. And it won’t privilege pessimism, optimism, audiences, owners, states, technology, or labor – but, rather, stress their mutual imbrication.

(Miller, 2010, p. 187)

Disability must be added to this list of focus points in everyday life. A disability studies approach to television has tended to favour a pessimism firmly located within a television studies 1.0 and 2.0 approach, favouring analysis of production or representation over audience agency or access to this medium. Throughout this book, I argue it is time to move beyond social model stereotypes of disability on television to consider the full circuit of culture, or the intersections and influences of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation. Indeed, just as with television, the definition of disability has changed. At one point in time, disability would have been recognised as a medical problem within a so-called damaged body, it existed firmly within the realm of medicine not human rights. Over time, this has slowly begun to change – disability can now be seen to have a cultural identity or be socially created. This so-called social model of disability argues that people are disabled and disempowered, not by their bodies but by inflexible social practices and power imbalances that see these bodies as inferior. Proceeding from the UNCRPD, disability includes ‘those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others’ (United Nations, 2006). While the United Nations maintain they do not define disability in their convention, this description is useful in recognising both the impacts of impairments and social disablement.

In analysing these key themes of representation on and access to television for people with disability, and privileging the aforementioned human rights approach, this book proceeds from a media and cultural studies framework. Within this, Du Gay et al.’s concept of the circuit of culture offers some useful insights to disability and digital television cultures. The circuit of culture is a five-point framework – encompassing representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation – through which to undertake cultural analysis (Du Gay et al., 1997). This approach has been recognised as enabling ‘the recognition of power, culture and identity, as well as the fluid nature of the construction of meaning’ (Tombleson & Wolf, 2017). This circuit holds relevance to a cultural study of disability and television. Disability is constructed through culture (Shakespeare, 1994) – ‘the process by which meaning is produced, circulated, consumed, commodified and endlessly reproduced and renegotiated in society’ (Curtin & Gaither, 2007, p. 35).

The circuit of culture is therefore applied throughout this book to both disability itself, representations of disability on television, insights obtained through interviews with people with disability, online discussions about television texts and technologies, as well as assistive technologies used to access television such as captions and audio description. The circuit of culture offers an opportunity to reflect on the intersections between the aforementioned five cultural processes, which, although distinct, intersect and influence each other in several ways to give meaning to disability and television in Australia.

Within this circuit are other smaller circuits, for example, those related to captions and audio description specifically. Captions in Australia are regulated according to the Broadcasting Services Act (1992). Historically, captions have been produced for certain programming but have not always been made available on every platform. However, they are increasingly being represented as a mainstream tool anybody can use to increase their comprehension of television. Conversely, audio description is not regulated and continues to be stigmatised as a costly accessibility feature for a seemingly non-existent television audience. Issue...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part 1 Representation
• Part 2 Access
• Index