LANGUAGE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE BODY
Critical Research into Disability, Impairment & Web Accessibility for UK Jobseekers
Dr David Kreps and Dr Peter Wheeler
Information Systems, Organisations and Society Research Centre (ISOS),
Informatics Research Institute, (IRIS),
Abstract:
This paper draws on the methodological approach of a research team examining eDiscrimination on the web. Disabled computer users have highlighted problems that occur when accuracy of terms is lost and specific meanings become conflated. Within the IS field there appears little critical reflection on the meaning of the term, ‘disabled’ – with notable exceptions. In this paper we illustrate how an alternative methodological approach has been forged based on the understandings of people with impairments, who are disabled by inaccessible ICT design, and demonstrate how such understandings form an historical continuity. Adopting a research agenda where clear and definite meanings are allocated for the terms ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ is shown to provide a clearing for fruitful critical research.
Introduction
The main aim of the European Social Fund (ESF) research project at Salford University is to facilitate increased employment opportunities for disabled people in the North West of England, UK. The focus of the research is aimed at the fact that employment opportunities are often marketed on inaccessible websites. Hence the project is concerned with the gap between the rhetorics of inclusion persistently deployed by government amongst others, against the realities of exclusion for many disabled people through inaccessible web materials.
In this paper we will consider one significant element of the research, that is, language, and the understanding of the place of the body in society, and how through the conflation of what are in fact very different terms, research in the area of web accessibility may in some cases have been missing the point. The ambiguity seemingly inherent in language is recognised as constituting problematic issues for critical social research (Gergen et al cited in: Alvesson et al 2000:241), hence whilst acknowledging the perfidious nature of the task, we nevertheless seek to question the usage of two specific terms: ‘impairment,’ and ‘disability.’ In this paper, we will use these terms with the following definitions: impairment we will define as an individual’s limitation in performing certain tasks as a consequence of lack of physical, cognitive, or sensory functioning, e.g. visual impairment meaning one’s eyes are unable to perform the act of seeing, etc; disability we will define as the barriers which exclude people with impairments from participation in society. The gap between impairment and successful engagement with society is increasingly filled with what is known as “assistive technologies”, all the more important as society itself becomes more and more technologised. Such “assistive technologies,” for example screen reading software which reads text on a computer screen aloud, has made a wealth of what used to be exclusively print-based material accessible to the visually impaired. However, this is not the whole story. Whilst the impairment that prevents direct visual access to the screen has been overcome, not all screen content is accessible to the assistive technology.
After more than a decade of development of the World Wide Web, despite the consolidation of web accessibility standards (Chisholm 1999) and despite the enactment of strong disability discrimination legislation in many Western countries, much of the web remains inaccessible to the assistive technologies used by people with visual impairments, who are thus disabled by it. The use of the terms impairment and disability are here carefully chosen, but as will become clear through the course of this paper, the terms are all too frequently conflated, made interchangeable, and confused.
As the originating Briefing Package for the creation of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative, (WAI) succinctly summarised in January 1997, “Part of the W3C's commitment to realize the full potential of the Web is to promote a high degree of usability for people with disabilities. The current situation in that area is not very good and is getting worse everyday as more and more people rush into the Web business without any awareness of the new limitations and frontiers they may create. No single disability population is unaffected.” (W3C 1997). The US Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was updated in 1998 and "Section 508" stated specifically that Federal agencies' electronic and information technology should be accessible to people with disabilities. In May 1999, the WAI published its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). In Europe the Lisbon Agenda, adopted in the summer of 2000, which set out to make the EU "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world” specified a greater social cohesion agenda which has translated into substantial eInclusion and eAccessibility programmes, that mandate WAI Level AA accessibility for all public websites. National legislation on Disability Discrimination in countries around the world, as it relates to the provision of services, has been interpreted as including services delivered electronically. The Australian Disability Discrimination Act 1992 is the only legislation globally that has been tested in court in this respect, (though the Americans with Disabilities Act may soon be tested in the case against Target (Clark 2006)). In the Australian case of Maguire v The Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, the court found that the Committee had been in breach of the Act by failing to provide a website to which Mr Maguire (a blind Australian) could have access (Clark 2002). Yet despite these developments at the turn of the century, research as recent as 2005 suggests that the web remains largely inaccessible (eGovernment Unit 2005).
This paper focuses upon a problem that may in fact be contributing to the delay in making the web accessible. It outlines the theoretical and methodological approach behind a research project underway at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom, into the accessibility of employment related websites in the North West of England (including some UK national websites, too) and describes its first tentative findings. A number of interviews have taken place in the initial, exploratory phase of the Salford research, with disabled computer users, (DCUs). Analysis of these interviews has contributed to the development of the research focus and methodology.
Our research shows that in common with contemporary writings on disability (Seymour 1998), DCUs accept the notion that the corporeal experience of impairment can have significant affects on interactions with the external world. However, what critical reflection reveals (see Armstrong 1983; Dutton 1996; Scott 1969; Wendell 1996) is that although bodily impairment is at the root of the phenomenology of these issues, disability on the other hand is frequently regarded as outside the body, a form of social, political and cultural oppression which causes discrimination against impaired people. In short, as Moser succinctly summarises, “‘disabled’ is not something one is but something one becomes” (Moser 2006). Some may argue this approach is simply a linguistic trope, a semantic play or language game. However, we would argue, if ICT designers are to embark on research in the area of disability then an interdisciplinary approach is required, a place where ICTs engage with sociological and philosophical concepts sometimes regarded as outside the field.
Hence to provide an indication of our approach, in this work-in-progress paper, we will begin by considering some concepts of ‘the body’ from critical theory, which can inform understandings at the boundary of ICT and disability. Then we shall examine the approaches of most research into web accessibility, and where our own research differs in its focus. This focus will lead us into a brief historical overview of employment policies towards people with impairments. Finally we shall present the methodology adopted by our research, and our initial findings.
Language and the Body
The tenacious physicality of the body, in the face of all the theories of social construction in recent decades, is something which the team undertaking research at the University of Salford are keen to ensure gains equal weight in our thinking. The social construction of the individual, for a number of writers in gender theory, linguistics, and critical theory in general, is a continuous, interpenetrative, and never-culminating process. (Goffman 1990; Butler 1990; Butler 1993; Butler 1997; Foucault 1994; Kreps 2003) The presentation of self in social interaction is, for these writers, an issue of performance, of the presentation of a ‘self’. This presentation of self moreover is fractured according to context – we present different characters in different contexts, and the lines these characters may utter are written largely by the social situations in which we find ourselves. The process of interaction between us defines the performance, and these performances in turn, in total, define the Self. The most fundamental of these roles – our genders - have been the focus of recent attention by the group of thinkers known as the post-feminists, most prominent among whom is Judith Butler. Importantly, however, for our discussion in this paper, Butler analyses the limits of this social constructivism as a concept - how it is prone to fall either into a linguistic monism, "whereby everything is only and always language," (Butler 1993:6) or into places where construction requires the agency of a constructor, viz 'If gender is constructed, then who is doing the constructing?' Her proposal is to return to the notion of matter, which she re-defines as "a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter." The body, in Butler’s analysis, is marked off through a process of erasing, of selectivity, which, through persistent reiteration, becomes a boundary that is defined rather by what it is not, than by what it is. In this way, for example, people with impairments become defined by that impairment, in the eyes of the society around them – what their body cannot do, that other bodies can do, becomes the defining feature of their bodies, and of their selves.
The process of reiteration – of persistent repetition – is what defines these boundaries. As Butler asserts, "there is no reference to a … body which is not at the same time a further formation of that body" (Butler 1993:10). We are dealing here, at root, with the relationship between language and the body. Of course, the performance of the self, the act of speaking, the 'substance' of language, is the movement of the body, the physical, grounded production of visual signals picked up by physical eyes, and auditory signals picked up by physical ears. To speak is to move one's vocal cords, one's lungs, one's lips and tongue. Language is, at its inception, a physical act, which, immediately it is loosed into the social sphere, becomes something other, some field in which our very physicality - our genders, age, racial characteristics, impairments, and all the other elements of personal ‘front’ (Goffman 1990) - becomes socially defined not only for those around us but thereby, reciprocally, for ourselves.
Language, then, and the processes of social construction, at once distance us from, and inextricably connect us to our bodies, and two words in particular seem to epitomise this tension – impairment and disability. It is unfortunate but true that these two words are all too often conflated and that the highly significant distinctions between them are all too often invisible. It is doubly unfortunate because social policy is often based upon such lack of clarity – even in otherwise well-meaning research.
In the tension and space between impairment and disability lie the battles of the disability rights movement. Contemporary writers on disability issues have reinforced the importance in clearly understanding the divide between impairment and disability, and the social creation of disability (Oliver 1992). There have also been critiques of traditional research methodologies which have tended to alienate the disabled subjects of research and only serve to promote the interests and careers of mainly non disabled researchers (Barnes 2003; Oliver 1992). There have, too, been critiques of the extent to which the social model of disability can be applied (Shakespeare et al 2002). Such critiques build on earlier critical research which warned those involved in disability research of the political naivety of ignoring the effects of impairment in favour of the more powerful and perceived homogenous concept of disability (Hughes et al 1997). Our argument is that critical ICT research into the disabling affects of inaccessible design can only be improved by embracing these wider and equally valid areas of complementary research, albeit from sister disciplines.
The research being undertaken by the Salford team focuses upon ensuring the two terms, impairment and disability, are not conflated at any point in the research process, that the physical nature of impairment is clearly acknowledged at the same time as the social nature of disability is foregrounded and analysed. Having discussed the substantive difference between the two terms, it may now be helpful to consider the practicality of our approach, by contrast to the approaches of more traditional research into web accessibility.
Technology, impairment and disability
In very recent times, “There [has been] a dawning recognition of the important role that disability plays in the complex social, economic, and political environments of information technologies” (Annable, Goggin & Stienstra 2007). Naturally, as Stienstra stresses, “In a global information society, disability organizations are especially interested in the role that information technologies play in increasing or decreasing…[the]…marginalisation of people with disabilities.” (Stienstra, 2007)
Many recent research studies into the technical accessibility of various categories of website have been undertaken, (e.g. Zaphiris et al 2001; Ritchie et al 2003; Guo et al 2005). Research undertaken by City University for the Disability Rights Commission and published in April 2004, (DRC 2004), which examined over 1000 UK websites across all sectors, and the study of some 300 or more European Government websites published at the Ministerial eGovernment Conference in November 2005, (eGovernment Unit 2005) all used a broadly similar combination of strict pass/fail audit against the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (Chisholm 1999) and the results of a disabled user testing exercise, to assess the accessibility of websites. The combination of IT audit and user testing is needed because a simple automated software check against the guidelines, as commented elsewhere (Kreps & Adam 2006) is insufficient to address all the issues.
The aim of the majority of the technical research studies thus far undertaken in this field, therefore, has been to ascertain either a completely generalised assessment of the accessibility of websites on the World Wide Web in a particular country (DRC 2004; Guo et al 2005) or in a particular sector (eGovernment Unit 2005; Thompson et al 2003). These studies, whilst worthy and of technical interest, are perhaps somewhat lacking in focus, however. The issue of the accessibility of websites to people with impairments is fundamentally about those people being able to partake fully in the information society, and not be confronted by disabling barriers. There is no more disabling barrier than the economic, and access to the labour market is of fundamental importance. This is, albeit at a higher economic level, not totally dissimilar to the obvious need for clean water and efficient food production in poverty-stricken third world countries, prior to the provision – however worthy and important – of cheap clockwork laptops. Yes, it would be good if the whole of the World Wide Web presented no disabling barriers to impaired surfers, but when between 81% (DRC) and 97% (eGovernment Unit 2005) of the web is inaccessible, websites advertising employment vacancies are of particular importance as regards research focus. Yet in an information society where even the local ‘Job Centre plus’ has touch-screen computers listing all their current vacancies (as is the case in the UK), what does this say about electronic access to employment opportunities? Governments may embrace a rhetoric of equality of opportunity under the banner of an homogenised concept, but the reality is that any person unable to access a touch screen cannot gain equal access. In this example, the effect of impairment means a severely visually impaired person cannot read a screen; the affect of the choice of technology means the impaired person is also disabled, by non inclusive design. Alternative tactile overlays for touch screens connected to speech synthesis are already on the market, but it would seem such equipment is not available to UK job seekers.
In this example we can see that technological devices are far from neutral in their interfaces and their deployment. Indeed we are warned against regarding technology as neutral by Martin Heidegger (1977), who argued technology is an all embracing process combining social actors, material resources and the metaphysical, an ordering of resources towards a standing reserve which can be later drawn upon (ibid:5-7). Heidegger also reminds us that the concept of technology is not new, by tracing the origins of the language of technology to ancient Greece he illustrates how artists developed technologies to facilitate their craft (ibid: 30-34). So, when we later discuss how governments acted to engage impaired war survivors in work, it can be regarded as a deployment of technology. Perhaps these wider definitions of technology can assist our analysis of recent UK research (George & Lennard 2007). Here the question raised is why seemingly ever increasing functionality and connectivity is added to many ICT products without responding to the question of why a significant sized demographic of all users appear unable to access such equipment. In other words, what may occur if technological progress is regarded as neutral, divorced from wider social scrutiny, is a discontinuity between the artefact and social actor. Then the critical question of whether such advances are useable by the majority becomes somewhat irrelevant. If the George and Lennard research is accepted and a demographic majority which includes younger people find accessing certain ICT equipment problematic, then perhaps it is hardly surprising that any technological developments where advance is considered as neutral will do so without regard to the requirements of specific demographic minorities including disabled people.
The concept of technological neutrality has been explored in a good deal of IS literature with a common conclusion: technology is not a black box. As Bijker and Law state, "Technologies do not…evolve under the impetus of some necessary inner technological or scientific logic. They are not possessed of an inherent momentum. If they evolve or change, it is because they have been pressed into that shape," (Bijker & Law 1992). Technologies evolve according to a range of contingencies. New technologies are the result of conflict between different interest groups who determine their final shape; the ignorance, or financial interests, of other groups, indeed, can disenfranchise other interest groups who would wish to influence that final shape – as is here the case with the touch-screen technology in Job Centres. Above all, both the strategies and the consequences of these processes in totality, are emergent, that is, they are continually the result of changing circumstances. These concepts from Science and Technology Studies have been further developed by the Actor-Network Theorists (Law 1999, Latour 1993) showing that the ways in which technologies emerge in society are contingent upon a great range of heterogeneous influences and ever-changing circumstances. As Bruno Latour describes, even so simple a device as a door closer can become implicated, to the critical eye, in prescriptive discrimination. (Latour 1988) If it goes too fast it privileges local users, who get used to it, over disabled/old/new users who find it troublesome. Every artefact has some human will placed into it. A policeman at a junction is replaced by an artefact that mediates his intention so that he need not be physically present. The traffic light, as an artefact, contains the programme: control the traffic at this junction. But because there isn't a real human being there anymore, people just drive through when they think they can. The anti-programme in the 'users' of the artefact is to cheat the programme in the artifact. So the police authorities install a camera that watches the traffic light and snaps you if you break the programme. Every artefact has such a programme in it, or more accurately, an artefact is only part of a programme of action. Such a programme, moreover, is to a greater or lesser extent, overtly or covertly, a political act. The architect Moses who designed much of New York's infrastructure built the rail bridges all around Central Park deliberately too low for the double-decker buses to pass under. The (mainly black) urban poor, who would use the buses, were thus excluded from the Park. "Science and technology are not politics. [But] they are politics by other means." (Latour 1988) Touch-screen access to computers in Job Centres discriminates against visually impaired job-seekers, as does disabling web design. Crucially, the absence of alternative tactile overlays for touch screens connected to speech synthesis software, may be due to a further language-use issue – the use of the words “alternative,” “assistive”, and “adaptive.” The very fact that “some technologies are identified as ‘normal’ and others as ‘abnormal’ or ‘adaptive’ [may] shape the extent to which users are understood as disabled or able.” (Stienstra, 2007).
What we are witnessing here is a location of “disability” in a socio-technical locus that sits at a junction of the relationships between self and the body, between technology and the body, between technology and society, and between self and society, with not a simple nor straightforward linkage to be discerned. As Moser puts it “There is no clear dividing line, at least in principle, between the technological, the social, and indeed the human.” (Moser 2006). So, drawing these analytical threads together, what are the socio-technical processes with which those whose bodies are “impaired” are either enabled or disabled by the technologies deployed?
Recovering employment initiatives through disability history
If a careful study of industrial history is undertaken then it illustrates that these points would be familiar to those engaged in the struggle to remove disabling barriers to labour markets, thereby providing greater opportunities for disabled people to gain paid work.
Employment, in fact, turns out to be a crucial barometer of social attitudes towards people with impairments. World events in the last century have had the effect of increasing the disabled population. These events were wars. Governments, after conscripting significant numbers of workers for both world wars, and for the Vietnam War, had a moral duty to try to reengage in employment returning troops who had gained injuries as a direct effect of war. Following the 1914-1918 conflict, there was a significant leap in the disabled population as many who were lucky enough to return, did so with acquired impairments. At this time, the welfare state in the UK had not fully developed (Armstrong 1983; Jones et al 1999), with the result that many injured war survivors relied on charity to assist them in regaining employment usually after extensive rehabilitation efforts.
One such charity formed in the UK in 1915 specifically charged with assisting seriously disabled troops re-engage in the employment market was St Dunstan’s (St Dunstan’s 2005). This charity formed by a wealthy blind patron Arthur Pearson (Dark 1922), was dedicated to assisting primarily blinded servicemen train in new careers which did not present barriers to their inclusion. Careers deemed suitable for blind people were principally those which had traditionally been adopted by sheltered workshops from the 19th century and included: boot repair, brush making, poultry rearing, spinning, piano tuning, basket making (Dark 1922; Henshaw’s 1928). Although institutions including St Dunstan’s and traditional charities, for example Henshaw’s, provided training and support for predominantly visually impaired people inside sheltered and supported environments, nevertheless a drive was taking place to move disabled people away from sheltered employment and into open unsubsidised industry. To achieve this goal - something current policy makers are attempting to mirror - disabled people from nearly a century past recognised and acted to remove the cause of disabling barriers, namely structural barriers in the workplace, together with negative attitudes from non disabled employers (Wheeler et al 2006). As Wheeler et al note, from before 1900 in the UK, disabled radicals challenged traditional charities by formulating an understanding of disability as socially constructed which created barriers to the inclusion of impaired people. Hence from the genesis of the 20th century the importance of terminology informed understandings. These circumstances were not unique, and again an historical continuity can be discerned following the next major World conflict.
Many soldiers acquired impairments as a result of the Second World War. On their return home, many organisations raised the issue of how these newly impaired people could go back to work (Anderson 1941; Dickson 1950; MacDougall 1944). The response from the UK government was to instruct a committee, made up of members from the Ministry of Labour (MOL), the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and employers under the chairmanship of M.P. George Tomlinson to report on how disabled people could return to employment after the war. The resulting report (Tomlinson 1943) heavily influenced the UK Disabled Persons Employment Act (1944). The outcome of Tomlinson’s report can be summarised as follows: Rehabilitation centres were opened to assist the removal of some impairment effects e.g. fitting of prosthetic limbs; together with structural interventions in the labour market to improve employment opportunities, e.g. placing an obligation on employers to engage a percentage of their workforce from disabled people. The failure of these initiatives is not a matter for this paper; we are simply demonstrating a continuity in understanding regarding what causes disability: the barriers which exclude people with impairments from participation. It is also possible to say such understandings were not restricted to the UK, as one submission to the Tomlinson committee was proposed as an exemplar of best practice in disability employment initiatives from the US. The British limbless ex-servicemen’s association (Chandley 1943), presented an example of how one major employer in the US had removed structural employment barriers to engage significant numbers of impaired people in work.
Chandley presented the Tomlinson committee with evidence from the Ford Motor Company who claimed that at their ‘River Rouge’ plant in Detroit their employment practices had enabled approximately 10% of the workforce to be employed from disabled people. This amounted to 11,652 people in total. Impairments ranged from blindness, totally deaf people, mobility and some cognitive impairments, together with leg amputees and a number with both arms missing. Ford were able to employ such a diverse range of impaired people by altering working practices, methods of working, and structural changes which allowed the variety of impaired people to work alongside other workers and at the same rate of pay (Chandley 1943: 1). Also in the US, following the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA) of 1974 ensured specific protection for veterans’ employment rights. The law required that employers with Federal contracts or subcontracts of $25,000 or more provide equal opportunity and affirmative action for Vietnam era veterans, and special disabled veterans. We are not going to engage in any analysis over the motivation of any of the above, but these examples illustrate the structural nature of disabling barriers has historical resonance. To achieve the aim of greater employment for disabled people, not only were structural alterations to physical workplaces required, but also changes to working practices, cultural, political and attitudinal changes which all fall inside the actor-network ‘cloak’ of technology.
The issue this brief historical review reveals is that once impairment and disability are divorced from any causal linkage then inclusion becomes more an issue of equal rights. Clearly the incidences highlighted above do not represent any significant turning points in the history of employment for disabled people. The reasons for this situation are many, complex, and outside the scope of this paper. However, we would argue, adopting a methodology, which instills a clear distinction and understanding in regard to how disability and the related concept of eDiscrimination are formulated, can only aide ICT designers and commissioners to ensure that the digital divide is at least narrowed in this specific arena. Hence our research does not claim to represent any new understandings or a paradigmatic shift, but is based on historical continuity, informed in the first instance from the phenomenological and ontological understandings gained from DCUs. It is to these understandings we shall now turn.
Research at the University of Salford
The unique aspect of the research being undertaken at Salford is in our research methodology. In the first instance we have rejected using impairment categorisations as any basis for determining user groupings – an approach used by all the technical web accessibility research referred to above. This is for two significant reasons. Many impaired people have multiple impairments which mean any attempts at simple unitary categorisation are inherently problematic. So for example, if a person with hearing impairment additionally is visually impaired, how can this combination be accommodated? Which impairment effect becomes disabled by which disabling design? Secondly, as we have rejected the notion that impairment disables, then in a project designed to expose levels of disability inside technological designs, it would be methodologically inconsistent to use impairment as a defining characteristic. Rather we have based our categorisation on the access methods used by impaired computer users. Thus one category is users of text-to-speech technologies. These are used by people with a variety of impairments, including the entire range of visual impairments, and many dyslexics, too. The technological design considerations necessary to ensure that text-to-speech synthesis works well on a website does not differ, however, according to impairment.
The first set of interviews was conducted in an organisation aimed towards improving employment opportunities for disabled people. The set comprised of six disabled people of varying age ranges with an equal gender ratio. Two disabled trainers were engaged to provide guidance and support on the use of assistive technology and using internet resources including job searches. All eight people agreed from a general focus group meeting to an individual interview. These were semi structured with all contacts and interviews conducted by an impaired researcher. The impaired status of the researcher has been noted for the reason that the majority of participants commented they felt more comfortable talking about how impairment affected the methods they used to access computers with someone who clearly had similar experiences. Here the empathetic relationship between researcher and researched aided both gaining access to participants which subsequently also assisted in defining the overall research methodology. However, the issue of an impaired researcher requires consideration as his own subjective experiential knowledge could skew research questions and subsequent analysis. As discussed earlier, this project adopts many of the calls for emancipatory disability research made by disability activists and academics (Barnes 2003; Oliver 1992). In line with UK disability writings a social barriers approach is acknowledged as a prime cause of disability. The research is partly led by disabled people and is guided and amended based on the comments and participation of DCUs. This induces a continuous process of reflection and change (Trauth 1997), which helps mitigate any subjective bias by disabled researchers. In essence, the researchers apply reflexive practice by confronting one idea or train of thought with another (Alvesson et al 2000:247).
It was from initial research that the issue of training in assistive technology was highlighted by DCU’s, an issue which subsequently became an integral concept in the project. Another element reinforced through initial research was the problematic nature of using impairment as a defining domain. Two participants did not use any assistive technology, self defined as disabled and did have difficulty in accessing web materials. Their experiences closely aligned with a user of text magnification. All three participants had different impairments but faced the same or similar disabling barriers. All found the amount of material and particularly the overlapping of pages with cascading menus etc made web pages extremely difficult if not impossible to navigate. In contrast, two screen reader users who had more severe impairments found that because they did not rely on any visual page information to navigate, the issue of overlapping documents was not problematic. For some researchers who adopt impairment categorisations this may appear counter intuitive. Although stressing the preliminary nature of this research, it would seem that the severity of impairment does not necessarily correspond to levels of disability when accessing the web. Once again we would cite such findings as providing validity for our methodological approach, whilst acknowledging our project is limited in scope.
Clearly, our project can only focus on those disabled people who have access to a computer and have gained sufficient training to use their assistive technology. For this specific group the project can help bridge the digital divide between disabled and non-disabled computer users. For those who do not have access to suitable computing equipment then the digital divide can only get wider. Fuller discussion of the discourses surrounding the digital divide has been undertaken elsewhere (see Servon 2002; Selwyn 2002 & 2004; and Adam & Kreps 2006). In the present instance it is sufficient to conclude that the practicalities of crossing that divide for many impaired people are made all the more difficult by disabling ICT design practices. Here there may reside multiple variables which reinforce social exclusion from technological systems including financial, educational, and in some instances cultural influences which this research cannot account for. In short, we acknowledge the limited nature of our research but would argue the methodological approach we have designed could be used on a wider research front inside ICT programmes which could then help to bridge the digital divide.
Research design and anticipated outcomes
The project can be divided into 3 distinct areas. Although as discussed above, several research projects have already determined an overall picture of web accessibility in the UK and elsewhere, a quantifiable study of over 100 employment related websites, focusing on the North West of England, but including UK national sites, has been conducted. We do not anticipate any significant variations from previous research in this area, but producing current specifically targeted data will allow the research team to question commissioners and designers of web materials in the region. Hence the first element of the project connects directly to the second which is semi-structured interviewing of organisations in the public, private and not for profit sectors regarding their understandings of the web and issues of accessibility and usability. The third key research area is the experience of DCUs. There are 3 ways in which disabled users inform the research. Focus group meetings are intended to allow an open forum where individuals can voice general concerns and comments on any aspects of computer use and access issues. These groups will be audio recorded and later analysed to determine common themes and concepts which can then inform the second phase of semi-structured interviews with individuals. Finally, the project website has an interactive section where disabled users will be invited to attempt to access specified employment websites and provide feedback to the project on their experiences. Analysis will encompass the broad – and critical - definitions of technology discussed above, where artefacts, notions of self, social and political attitudes, together with arguments of corporate social responsibility and the business case for making websites accessible amongst other factors come together to form technology. An appropriate framework or lens through which to analyse such data is actor network theory. By removing any potential for technology to be regarded as an unquestionable neutral black box, actor network theory will allow questions of accessibility to move away from ‘technical fixes’ or engineering solutions – arguably the focus of most previous studies - and place the problem of accessibility to technology equally in the social, political, economic, and business environments. Additionally, further light should then be shed, in the focus group material in particular, upon the relationship between the impaired body and notions of the self in the information society.
Outcomes will include, in common with previous studies, determining what barriers commonly prevent access to, in this case employment websites for people who use alternative computer access equipment. These findings will be contrasted with the approach and opinions of industry and web commissioning organisations that are responsible for materials published on the web. Our research will be presented at national and international academic conferences for critical review. Also, a report will be produced for the European Social Fund (ESF), where it can inform European policy makers on web accessibility issues. All contributory organisations have been offered a copy of the final report, as have the DCUs involved in the study. The report will also be published on the project website for a much wider audience. The aim of the research is to investigate the gap between the realities of DCUs and the often cited rhetorics of inclusion and accessibility from both government and industry. The research will explore the gap between rhetoric and reality and produce data which can assist better understandings of where problems reside which can then facilitate their removal. Finally, the research should also inform the academic community regarding both the detail and practicality of web inaccessibility, and the critical research issues that arise from it and which can inform other areas of research in IS.
Summary and conclusions
We have sought to demonstrate that research in the arena of accessibility of ICTs can be improved with a wider understanding which incorporates both contemporary discourses of disability, technology, and identity, coupled with critical historical review. It seems hardly controversial to argue the most appropriate people to speak of impairment and disability are those who are impaired and disabled. This approach has defined our methodological framework which has evolved and hopefully will continue to do so throughout the project. Perhaps the most significant development arose from the understandings that impairment and disability have very different causal origins, one related to the corporeal experience, the other created by the construction of barriers to inclusion for impaired people. As we have discussed, this analysis aligns with many arguments presented by feminists fighting for gender equality, and more contemporary writers on disability studies. Our research builds on both traditions whilst acknowledging limitations. The added dimension we offer to disability ICT research is to illustrate how such understandings are not new and historical echoes can easily be drawn upon to complement and inform present day research.
In conclusion, our call is for research into the accessibility of ICTs to be based on wider concepts than those bounded in the majority of studies in the area of disability and technology, and for impaired people to be placed as knowing subjects pivotal in the research process, which can allow evolving methodologies to flourish based on the expert knowledge of DCUs.
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