Disability and Social Media

Global Perspectives

Katie Ellis, Mike Kent, Katie Ellis, Mike Kent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317150275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialarbeit

Social media is popularly seen as an important media for people with disability in terms of communication, exchange and activism. These sites potentially increase both employment and leisure opportunities for one of the most traditionally isolated groups in society. However, the offline inaccessible environment has, to a certain degree, been replicated online and particularly in social networking sites. Social media is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives yet the impact on people with disabilities has gone largely unscrutinised.

Similarly, while social media and disability are often both observed through a focus on the Western, developed and English-speaking world, different global perspectives are often overlooked. This collection explores the opportunities and challenges social media represents for the social inclusion of people with disabilities from a variety of different global perspectives that include Africa, Arabia and Asia along with European, American and Australasian perspectives and experiences.

1
Introduction

Social disability

Katie Ellis and Mike Kent

Background

Social media has become a vital element of how we communicate with each other. It has, in a short space of time, risen from the obscurity of dialup bulletin board discussion pages to platforms like Facebook where 936 million people log on every day (Internet World Statistics, 2015). These networks are increasingly integrated into our everyday lives through the proliferation of smartphones and the integration of social media apps that now form the backbone of many of these platforms. However, while social media is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, its impact on people with disabilities has gone largely unscrutinised. Are people with disabilities using social media in the same way as the majority of the population? Are they able to, or are they excluded from social media spaces in the same ways they are excluded from much of public life and participation? Importantly, how are people with disabilities in different parts of the world engaging with social media? Furthermore, how can an investigation of disability and social media advance interdisciplinary disability studies?

When we began planning this book we surmised that social media was popularly seen as an important media for people with disability in terms of communication, exchange and activism (Ellis & Goggin, 2015). Social media sites, we suggested, potentially increase both employment and leisure opportunities for people with disabilities who are one of the most traditionally isolated groups in society. However, we were also aware that, despite this potential for social inclusion, there is the potential that these platforms replicate the inaccessibility and discriminatory attitudes people with disabilities regularly experience offline (Ellis & Kent, 2011), particularly on social networking sites. Social media has the potential to both enable and further disable people with disability. For example, despite recognised benefits of social inclusion for people with disabilities, Scott Hollier notes the continuation of inaccessibility in social media in his seminal report Sociability: Social media for people with a disability:

all of the popular social media tools remain inaccessible to some degree. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, blogging websites and the emerging Google+ all feature limited accessibly, denying many consumers with disabilities the opportunity to participate in social media.

(Hollier, 2012, p. 11)

Although Hollier paints a dreary picture regarding accessibility in social media, his report holds much scope for optimism, as did we as we embarked this project:

Fortunately, users have often found ways around the accessibility barriers such as alternative website portals, mobile apps, additional keyboard navigation shortcuts and online support groups. This is a rich source of expertise, and social media users with disability continue to find creative ways to access the most popular platforms.

(Hollier, 2012, p. 11)

With Hollier’s observations firmly in mind, we have compiled a collection which explores the opportunities and challenges social media represents for the social inclusion of people with disabilities all over the world. It is a long book, longer than we thought it would be as we began planning. It is a long book because disability and social media is a large topic and does, as we thought, encompass communication, exchange, activism and leisure, and the way it is used by different groups in different locations contains much diversity.

Core values

In January 2011 the American president Barack Obama stated that ‘there are certain core values that… we believe are universal: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, people being able to use social networking’ (Ackerman, 2011, para. 7). While this statement was made in response to protests in Egypt against the rule of Honsi Mubarak, it highlights the increasing importance of web-based platforms that allow people to construct a public profile, connect with others and thereby participate in society.

Previously in 2009 at the More Than Gadgets Conference in Fremantle, Western Australia, Graeme Innes, the Australian Disability and Race Discrimination Commissioner, spoke of the link between disability and social media. He suggested that social networking had the potential to open up vast opportunities to people with disability to participate in society. He also cautioned that, in the future, people who were not using these networks, including those without a disability, would find themselves effectively disabled by a lack of access to information and communication.

Similarly Beth Haller argues social media is particularly important for people with disabilities:

and this explosion of [social media] has included many people with disabilities. It is a way to organize disability rights actions, let others know about disability related news, promote events, or just find like-minded disability rights advocates. It also has the advantage of mitigating some disabilities, like providing an easy communication system for people who are deaf or have speech disabilities. On the other hand, text-heavy social networking sites that require being computer savvy might create barriers for people with intellectual disabilities, serious learning disabilities, or those who have visual impairments.

(2010, p. 5)

In a recent survey of 341 Australians with a disability (see Ellis, Chapter 11 this volume) it emerged that 20 per cent of respondents had been profiled by the mainstream media, 6 per cent maintained a disability blog, 12 per cent contributed articles to disability blogs, 3 per cent made YouTube videos about their lives and 47 per cent commented on social networking sites or blogs related to disability issues. While this is a high amount of political engagement online related to disability, 36.5 per cent of the cohort also claimed to blog, tweet, YouTube and Face-book but not about disability issues. These figures show people with disabilities are using social media in both political and non-political ways.

Disability stories

This finding is also evident in a recent Storify compilation of the power of #Social-Media and #DisabilityStories where people participating in the conversation identified both new types of disability narratives becoming available, and the potential to connect with others online. The conversations emphasised both the opportunities and challenges of the most popular social media platforms, for example communicating via 140 characters on Twitter or feeling limited by Facebook’s constantly changing platforms (see Wong, 2015).

However, while Haller and these people participating in social media conversations emphasise recreation and advocacy, it important to first consider whether people with disabilities are able to access social media.

This introductory chapter first explores how an understanding of disability is transformed when it is applied to the use of the internet, and particularly social networks – termed digital disability. We outline four different stages of digital design in relation to accessibility of internet platforms. These four stages describe how an online platform can be accessible but not widely distributed, widely distributed but not accessible, widely distributed and retrofitted to be accessible, or ‘born’ accessible and widely distributed. These different approaches can be illustrated through the recent history of social media by the approach taken to accessibility by MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Digital disability

The social model of disability distinguishes between disability and impairment. It maintains that disability is the result of decisions made by society and their impact on an individual with a specific impairment (see Finkelstein, 1980; Oliver, 1996). For example, a person may have a specific impairment that means that they use a wheelchair to aid mobility; however, they are disabled when they come to a set of stairs with no alternate access.

Disability is activated differently online compared to the analogue world and has uneven effects on different impairments. Whereas a person who uses a wheel-chair for mobility may not necessarily experience disability when accessing the internet, people with various perceptual and cognitive impairments, as well as those that relate to manual dexterity, may require accessible websites and assistive technologies. Just as the absence of a ramp disabled the wheelchair user in the analogue world, these users are disabled by inaccessible web design. The way that different aspects of the internet and world wide web are constructed – choices made by society – will then determine the disabling impact of these different impairments (see Goggin & Newell, 2003; Ellis & Kent, 2011).

At its most fundamental level, information stored digitally online should be able to be accessed in a wide variety of ways that will best suit any potential users. For example, it can be presented visually on a screen, or audibly as spoken word, music or any other noises that might aid in the operation or navigation of a particular platform, it can also be delivered through touch such as with a Braille tablet or a Lorm glove. As well as retrieving information in this way, it can also be inputted and digitised through any of these mediums. As Foley and Ferri (2012, p. 192) observe:

Technology is often characterised as liberating – making up for social, educational and physical barriers to full participation in society. Often viewed in very 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 largely inconsequential difference.

Social media and four stages of digital accessibility

However, the way information is stored and formatted can constrain a person’s ability to access it, and will have a disabling impact on people with different impairments. In the past we have observed that there are four broad stages to digital design/accessibility on the internet (see Ellis & Kent, 2011).

At the first stage, an online platform will be accessible, but not highly distributed or used. In these cases, design decisions that will exclude people have yet to be made. As Jaeger (2012, p. viii) observes, ‘Ironically, the pre-Web Internet – an environment in which content was mostly limited to electronically readable text – was more accessible to many users with disabilities than is the contemporary Web-enabled Internet.’ For social media this stage is evident in the earliest forms of online social networks in dialup bulletin board enabled chatrooms, and the discussion forums of Usenet where the simple text-based interface could be easily interpreted by assistive technologies.

The second stage of digital design is where a particular platform or service is highly popular, but not accessible. In this case a platform has achieved a large distribution before any thought has been given to accessibility for people with disabilities. As Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra (2007, p. 146) have questioned:

If there is much more acceptance of disability as a social, rather than purely medical, phenomenon, and greater public support for the removal of barriers and for an end to discrimination and exclusion of people with disabilities, why are information technologies – often the newest, most heralded ones – still disabling?

From the perspective of social media this can be seen in MySpace. The social networking site that overtook Google as the most visited site on the internet in 2006, was also notoriously inaccessible and resistant to any pressure to change the network to make it more accommodating (Ellis and Goggin 2014).

The third stage occurs when one of these platforms that was previously inaccessible is then changed – retrofitted – to become accessible and inclusive. As Wentz, Jaeger, and Lazar (2011) observe, this process of retrofitting technology is inevitably more expensive than planning a project with universal access in mind from the beginning. In 2010 Facebook became the most visited site on the web. The year before, in consultation with the American Foundation for the Blind, it had overhauled the platform to make it more accessible for people with disabilities who rely on assistive technologies. Twitter initially had a different approach with Dennis Lembree in 2009 famously designing his own site Accessible Twitter as a workaround to what was, at the time, Twitter’s own inaccessible web interface (Ellis & Kent 2010). As Scott Hollier demonstrates in Chapter 6 of this book, Twitter has subsequently undergone its own retrofit for accessibility.

A final, fourth stage avoids this retrofit by having platforms that are born accessible, with accessible design for people with disabilities applied from the foundation and then maintained as the platform becomes widely distributed. When ...