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#Digital History
and Universal Design

Hollis' Story

  • excerpt from Hollis' BA Thesis (with permission)

'disability... a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do'

  • Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
  • it's not the body: its the technology that we are entangled with that produces 'disability'

we can produce disability through our digital tech choices:

assuming that everyone approaches information with same tools, abilities, methods risks excluding large percentages of people

"In fact, such tools do the work of disabiling people by preventing them from using digital resources altogether." - George H Williams

As hist3812a showed, every digital tool encodes assumptions about how the world works.

Consider 'The Templated Self'

A self or identity that is produced through various participation architectures, the act of producing a virtual or digital representation of self by filling out a user interface with personal information.

Amber Case

Who designs these participation architectures? And why is that important?

70% of Google employees are male. 61% are white and 30% Asian.
Of Google's "technical" employees. 83% are male. 60% of those are white and 34% are Asian.
70% of Apple employees are male. 55% are white and 15% are Asian. 80% of Apple's "technical" employees are male.
69% of Facebook employees are male. 57% are white and 34% are Asian. 85% of Facebook's "technical" employees are male.
70% of Twitter employees are male. 59% are white and 29% are Asian. 90% of Twitter's "technical" employees are male.
Audrey Watters

Screen Essentialism

  • The fallacy of assuming that every interaction will take place through the screen
  • Projection bias & false consciousness bias

There is no natural way to interact with 1s and 0s

that make up the data we are interested in creating, transmitting, receiving and using; there is only the model we have chosen to think of as natural.
George H Williams

Is a screen reader a disability or an ability?

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2PMuBQ7LyOw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> [Blind Inspiration Cast]
(http://www.blindinspirationcast.com/episode-19-computer-programming-and-technology-tips-part-2/)

What if you designed for sound?

Listening to topic models

Universal Design

  • design for the largest possible audience in mind

  • opens us up to different/new/better/alternate ways of representing information

  • if 'open access' means anything, it means this!

  • accessible design & mobile design overlap to a high degree

    thus futureproofs as well!

  • it's more efficient (splitting content from its representation)

  • and there may well be legal obligations too

Think about UD in your project

  • you might not be able to design universally for this project
  • but you can reflect, in your paradata document, about what opportunities you've foreclosed by not having your project as accessible as it might otherwise be.

Audit

Let's audit some digital history sites for their accessibility
http://wave.webaim.org/