Print

---

 

Free postage to UK customers.

 

We hope the following title will be of interest to you:

Restricted Access

Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation

Elizabeth Ellcessor

   "Restricted Access transforms our understanding of what 'access' means in an age when so much writing on new media fetishizes participation. Elizabeth Ellcessor reveals the ways in which ability, culture, and technology are all entangled in questions of accessibility. Timely and sophisticated, Ellcessor’s book is a major advance in media studies and disability studies, and will also be of great interest to scholars in policy."-Jonathan Sterne,author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format

   While digital media can offer many opportunities for civic and cultural participation, this technology is not equally easy for everyone to use. Hardware, software, and cultural expectations combine to make some technologies an easier fit for some bodies than for others. A YouTube video without closed captions or a social network site that is incompatible with a screen reader can restrict the access of users who are hard of hearing or visually impaired. Often, people with disabilities require accommodation, assistive technologies, or other forms of aid to make digital media accessible—useable—for them.

   Restricted Access investigates digital media accessibility—the processes by which media is made usable by people with particular needs—and argues for the necessity of conceptualizing access in a way that will enable greater participation in all forms of mediated culture. Drawing on disability and cultural studies, Elizabeth Ellcessor uses an interrogatory framework based around issues of regulation, use, content, form, and experience to examine contemporary digital media. Through interviews with policy makers and accessibility professionals, popular culture and archival materials, and an ethnographic study of internet use by people with disabilities, Ellcessor reveals the assumptions that undergird contemporary technologies and participatory cultures. Restricted Access makes the crucial point that if digital media open up opportunities for individuals to create and participate, but that technology only facilitates the participation of those who are already privileged, then its progressive potential remains unrealized. Engagingly written with powerful examples, Ellcessor demonstrates the importance of alternate uses, marginalized voices, and invisible innovations in the context of disability identities to push us to rethink digital media accessibility.

New York University Press

Postmillennial Pop

March 2016 272pp  9781479853434 PB £21.99 now only £17.59* when you quote CSL16ACCES when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/restricted-access

UK Postage and Packing FREE, Europe £4.50, RoW £4.99

(PLEASE QUOTE REF NUMBER: CSL16ACCES** for discount)

To order a copy please contact Marston on +44(0)1235 465500 or email [log in to unmask]

or visit our website:

 

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/restricted-access

 

where you can also receive your discount

 

 *Price subject to change.

 **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.

 

Follow us on Twitter @CAP_Ltd or Facebook Combined Academic Publishers