Accessibility, Universal Design, and Inter-Community Advocacy
I enjoyed the readings on accessibility and design, but I didn’t expect to learn much I didn’t already know—in retrospect, a deeply arrogant thought. I want to start by recording NC State University’s Principles For Universal Design (that is, design in which accessibility is an important part of the process, not an afterthought or a grudging addition:
“Equitable Use: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
Flexibility in Use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
Simple and Intuitive Use: Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
Perceptible Information: The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities.
Tolerance for Error: The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
Low Physical Effort: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
Size and Space for Approach and Use: Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user's body size, posture, or mobility (qtd. Dolmadge 13).”
To these, Jay Dolmadge adds an emphasis on assuming ability, demonstrating respect, and negotiating with the disabled people who will use your spaces to respond to their needs (14). These are all things I found self-evident, though appreciated. And yet, I initially dismissed our readings on caption design out of hand. Sure, it’s a neat thought experiment, but why would anyone want captions that did anything but convey information and get out of the way, allowing them to focus on the show (what a mentor of mine used to call writing for looking ‘through’, not looking ‘at’)? Certainly that’s what I want out of my captions, which I use frequently due to auditory processing issues.
Sean Zedneck’s “Designing Captions: Disruptive Experiments With Typography, Color, Icons, and Effects” was revelatory. Two moments in particular really stood out to me. The first, when Zedneck introduces the concept of meta captioning, or captioning media such as TVs, videos, etc within TV shows and movies:
“Meta captioning is disruptive. It highlights the mode of communication (as well as the primary stakeholders: deaf and hard of hearing viewers) over the meanings that are communicated through this mode. Meta captioning disrupts the very idea that captioning is always or simply about specific linguistic meanings [emphasis added].”
This concept immediately and powerfully resonated with me, as I remembered being sixteen years old, holding a Target catalog, and finding myself brought almost to tears by the image of a little girl using a gray walker with red handles, the same one I had had at her age, and smiling at the camera in her fairy costume and leaning her weight on her walker in a way I recognized. For the first time ever, someone like me was on a piece of junk mail. I was part of the ordinary landscape of media that surrounded me.
Reading Zedneck’s piece, I thought that metacaptioning must be like that—the sense that you and your lived experiences are mundane, a part of the fabric of society, not only recognized but widely recognized enough to show up in something we normally barely notice, that isn’t meant for widespread publicity. Moreover, the concept was a stark reminder that the background noise of a movie or TV show—something I wouldn’t normally think of as significant—is still a part of the experience of that piece of media that everyone deserves access to.
I was also struck when Zedneck, musing about how to caption the countdown of a bomb, says
“A beep is not a number. If equal access for all is the professed (but misunderstood) goal of captioning, then we have failed to provide access to the timer's beeping when we turn beeps into numbers. Indeed, by providing full access to the time remaining on the clock (instead of only partial and incomplete glimpses of the phone screen), we could actually be decreasing the amount of tension that viewers are expected to experience. How much time is remaining? I can't see the timer on his phone! Did it just say 01:37? A timer in the lower right removes doubt as it compromises the scene's dramatic tension. Perhaps an EKG wave or a countdown timer is not necessary or sufficiently helpful in these examples.”
It had never occurred to me before that the goal of captioning is (or should be) not simply to preserve the sense of what is happening or being said in a scene, but to preserve the tension and narrative resonance of the scene. Stories are and have always been so important to me, but I had never thought deeply before about what it would mean to tell stories in ways that offer full access to different groups of people (as Zedneck wisely reminds us, it’s not as simple as ‘access for all’. We would have to tell this story in a different way for someone with low vision). This set of readings has encouraged me to think more creatively about access to my work in the classroom and to the media I create when I’m just ‘playing around’, as well as serving as a reminder of the importance of not speaking over other disabled people’s experiences.
