What surprising multi-sensory technologies came up in today’s discussion? Some examples:
– Boston Linetype vs. Braille in the debate over Universal Design. (Touch this Page exhibit)
– BARD app
BARD really caught my attention. Being able to experience books, magazines, websites, and music scores as audio is one thing; but being able to experience these as braille, through a refreshing portable braille display connected to the BARD app, is absolutely brilliant.
In the disability movement, there are been many “Moments in which technologies of access and accommodation are in contention with one other” (also mentioned in the podcast for Touch this Page). Discuss the SSIs involved in these conflicts. For example: vision impaired, hearing impaired, gender, etc.
In the Touch This Page podcast, Sari Altschuler cites that “sometimes when we think of universal design, we actually make things less accessible for certain individuals because we stop thinking about particular kinds of embodiment and varieties of embodiment, and we have a fantasy that there’s going to be a, kind of, one-size-fits-all solution.”
Examples of these are:
– closed captions for television and movies [helps the hearing impaired, but does nothing for the vision impaired]
– audiobooks [helps the vision impaired, but does nothing for the hearing impaired]
When it comes to multi-sensory reading, why do you think haptic technologies are less “privileged” than audiovisual technologies?
Unfortunately, audiovisual technologies seem to overtake the well deserved attention that haptic technologies should be receiving. While the use of haptic technologies does seem like a possible one-size-fits-all solution, audiovisual technologies have become mainstream beyond the point of return. Closed captioning with accompanying audio is a preferred method of watching movies or series for a large number of people who are not hearing impaired; and audiobooks have become the new normal for people (who are not vision impaired) that are too busy to sit down with a book and read. With these technologies breaching the non-impaired (visual and hearing) population, the road towards haptic technologies being recognized and favored over audiovisual technologies may seem longer than ever.
Diversity+Tech 