Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, ... more Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, Plus de 1.612.000 de titres à notre catalogue ! Notice. 85.88 Ajouter au panier. Disability ...
"Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability... more "Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability studies, one of the few full-length accounts of disability and film internationally, and a pioneering study that should be widely read. Her timely book offers a comprehensive account of national culture, society and disability that makes an important contribution to our understanding of this vital area. Gerard Goggin, coauthor of Disability in Australia Disabled characters in 1990s Australian national cinema are both invisible and hypervisible. Existing within the landscape of diversity, as it emerged during the decade's focus on multiculturalism and minority-group interests, these characters are most often used to rehabilitate a previously marginalized other. This book critically examines numerous Australian films made during the 1990s, with reference to socio-political contexts and influences, to approach the question of disability as a problem with society rather than as one within a damaged body. It is directed towards researchers in film and disability fields, or anyone else who has an interest in people who exist on the margins of society."
Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability studi... more Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability studies, one of the few full-length accounts of disability and film internationally, and a pioneering study that should be widely read. Her timely book offers a comprehensive account of national culture, society and disability that makes an important contribution to our understanding of this vital area. Gerard Goggin, coauthor of Disability in Australia
Disabled characters in 1990s Australian national cinema are both invisible and hypervisible. Existing within the landscape of diversity, as it emerged during the decade's focus on multiculturalism and minority-group interests, these characters are most often used to rehabilitate a previously marginalized other.
This book critically examines numerous Australian films made during the 1990s, with reference to socio-political contexts and influences, to approach the question of disability as a problem with society rather than as one within a damaged body.
It is directed towards researchers in film and disability fields, or anyone else who has an interest in people who exist on the margins of society.
Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a ... more Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing.
Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.
This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital commun... more This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital communications platforms in times of disaster for people with disabilities has the potential to make already life-threatening situations considerably more dangerous. As we are increasingly coming to rely on a social media mash-up of digital platforms to assist in communications during disaster situations, the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities is as dire as if it was high ground during a tsunami or transport during a typhoon. The contemporary social media environment is characterised by a complex and overlapping network of complementary platforms, populated by user-generated content, where people communicate and exchange ideas. In this environment, YouTube videos are posted to Facebook and embedded in blogs, and Twitter is used to link to these other sites and is itself embedded in other platforms. These networks are increasingly supplementing and supplanting more traditional communication platforms, such as the television and radio, particularly in times of disaster. The concern of this paper is that the elements from which this mash-up of communications channels is made are not always accessible to people with disabilities. This evolving network of social media-based communication exposes the limits of existing Internet-based universal design.
Whereas entertainment has featured negatively in the broader NBN debate currently occurring in Au... more Whereas entertainment has featured negatively in the broader NBN debate currently occurring in Australia, within the disability sector it has been recognised as revolutionary. Government, industry and technical analysts describe digital television, particularly that delivered via broadband, as potentially enabling to people with vision and hearing impairments through the more widespread provision of accessibility features such as audio description and closed captions. This article interrogates the approach to accessibility taken by two case studies of broadband-based television: Netflix and catch-up TV. Netflix, which is not officially available in Australia, is often presented as the future of television, while catch-up services provide an example of the current roadband-based television paradigm in this country. Although accessibility features may be available on broadcast television or DVD release, each of these forms of broadband-based television has either previously (Netflix) or currently (catch-up) stripped accessible functions to stream online. The discussion reflects on both activist interventions of people with disability and the industry standards.
With user preference driving the digital innovations of televisions, the opportunities for viewer... more With user preference driving the digital innovations of televisions, the opportunities for viewers with disability to access television via broadband and digital platforms are profound. Viewers with disability have the potential to experience flexibility in the form of accessibility features such as audio descriptions, captions, lip-reading avatars, signing avatars, spoken subtitles and clean audio. This is especially true as digital television and broadband services converge to deliver television services online through sites such as Netflix. Similarly, with television communication becoming increasingly social, people with disability are mobilizing online to advocate for better television accessibility. While some opportunities for accessibility are not being realised, others are arising through the recognition of people with disability as a niche audience.
This article discusses participatory media from a critical disability perspective. It discusses t... more This article discusses participatory media from a critical disability perspective. It discusses the relative absence of explicit discussion and research on disability in the literatures on community, citizen and alternative media. By contrast, disability has emerged as an important element of participatory cultures and digital technologies. To explore disability participatory cultures, the article offers analysis of case studies, including disability blogs, ABC’s Ramp Up website and crowd-funding platforms (such as Kickstarter).
When Jon Snow accuses Tyrion Lannister of not knowing what it is to be a bastard in Season 1 of G... more When Jon Snow accuses Tyrion Lannister of not knowing what it is to be a bastard in Season 1 of Game of Thrones, Tyrion informs him that ‘all dwarves are bastards in their father’s eyes’. Later (in Season 4) he argued that he had been ‘on trial [for being] a dwarf [his] entire life'. His impassioned monologue prompted an equally impassioned Twitter response to #FreeTyrion. This article examines the role of disability in Game of Thrones in the context of both the clear and direct statements made about disability inclusion within the narrative as well as audience response to these depictions. The second aim of this paper is to explore the legitimacy of disability media studies itself and call for a more nuanced approached to disability television analysis in light of both representations of disability in the new televisual landscape exemplified by programmes such as Game of Thrones and the enthusiastic reactions of audiences with disability to such programming. While the social model of disability sought to give some legitimacy to the experience of disability as the social restriction of activity placed on top of people who had impairments rather than simply the experience of a damaged body (Oliver; Finkelstein), within the emerging critical disability studies arena, analysis of culture broadly and television in particular has not received the same level of attention.
This chapter draws upon and critically considers the emergence of children’s toys that have disab... more This chapter draws upon and critically considers the emergence of children’s toys that have disabilities. I focus in particular on Share a Smile Becky and Down Syndrome Dolls. Building on John Fiske’s (1989) argument that objects betray the values of the culture that produce them and that popular culture is intertextal and allows a variety of meaning I read these toys as part of a broader disability (sub)culture of popular culture that has the power to change mainstream cultural beliefs and hence empower people with disability. I link culture to politics and refer to the values and norms of Western societies. I explore some examples of how these toys have been used to investigate the issue of a disability identity in both children with disabilities and those without. Online discussions about these toys provide valuable articulations of the cultural politics of increasing the visibility of disability in popular texts and allow such processes to be understood, interrogated and incorporated into civil rights discourses. Popular culture, including children’s toys, has the power to make permanent change (Gerber 2000, 9).
Flexibility for many viewers comes from digital technologies and their interaction with televisio... more Flexibility for many viewers comes from digital technologies and their interaction with television broadcasting. Significantly, as television is switched to digital transmissions, viewers with disability have the potential to experience flexibility in the form of accessibility features such as audio descriptions, captions, lipreading avatars, signing avatars, spoken subtitles and clean audio. This flexibility may in fact provide some people with access to television for the first time. This exploratory study reports results from an online survey of Australians with disabilities conducted during the final months of the simulcast period before analogue signals were switched off in 2013. While captioning emerged as the most desired accessibility feature, differences surfaced when the data were broken into specific impairment types. This article highlights the importance of digital flexibility specific to impairment type, and locates people with disability as a significant group to consider as more changes take place around digital television broadcasting via the NBN.
This paper examines themes that emerge in discussion of Season 1 The Voice Australia's vision-imp... more This paper examines themes that emerge in discussion of Season 1 The Voice Australia's vision-impaired contestant Rachael Leahcar on The Voice Australia's official YouTube channel. The essay uses Pierre Lévy's conception of information utopia characterized by collective intelligence as a mechanism to examine the way representations of disability are responded to online. The paper outlines three broad themes that emerged in the available social media discourse about Leahcar's performances: first, themes that portray her as an inspirational sweet innocent, second, accusations that she had a competitive edge or ‘sob story’ that others could not compete with and, finally, that people with disabilities are entitled to compensation.
Social media also offered Rachael Leahcar the opportunity to respond to criticisms that she was not disabled enough – a critique often levelled at people with disability seeking accommodations. This paper argues that although Rachael was broadly constructed and interpreted as a ‘supercripple’, the affordances available through both reality television and television's use of social media provide the opportunity to introduce a different type of representation that embraces both incidentalist and non-incidentalist ways of understanding disability.
This year, 2008, marks the tenth anniversary of the portable MP3 player. MPMan F10, the first suc... more This year, 2008, marks the tenth anniversary of the portable MP3 player. MPMan F10, the first such device to utilise the MP3-encoding format, was launched in March 1998 (Smith). However it was not until April 2003 when Apple Inc launched the iPod that the market began the ...
Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, Jan 1, 2007
Abstract: Australian national cinema during the 1990s presented films that constructed disability... more Abstract: Australian national cinema during the 1990s presented films that constructed disability within a personal tragedy model thereby excluding disability from Australian national identity. The individualization of disability is a national project, which encourages the ...
... ECU Publications. Title. A Quest Through Chaos: My Narrative of Illness and Recovery. Authors... more ... ECU Publications. Title. A Quest Through Chaos: My Narrative of Illness and Recovery. Authors. Katie Ellis, Edith Cowan University. Document Type. Journal Article. Faculty. Education and Arts. School. Communications and Contemporary ...
Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, ... more Retour page d'accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d'accueil, Plus de 1.612.000 de titres à notre catalogue ! Notice. 85.88 Ajouter au panier. Disability ...
"Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability... more "Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability studies, one of the few full-length accounts of disability and film internationally, and a pioneering study that should be widely read. Her timely book offers a comprehensive account of national culture, society and disability that makes an important contribution to our understanding of this vital area. Gerard Goggin, coauthor of Disability in Australia Disabled characters in 1990s Australian national cinema are both invisible and hypervisible. Existing within the landscape of diversity, as it emerged during the decade's focus on multiculturalism and minority-group interests, these characters are most often used to rehabilitate a previously marginalized other. This book critically examines numerous Australian films made during the 1990s, with reference to socio-political contexts and influences, to approach the question of disability as a problem with society rather than as one within a damaged body. It is directed towards researchers in film and disability fields, or anyone else who has an interest in people who exist on the margins of society."
Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability studi... more Ellis offers a rich account of Australian cinema from the standpoint of critical disability studies, one of the few full-length accounts of disability and film internationally, and a pioneering study that should be widely read. Her timely book offers a comprehensive account of national culture, society and disability that makes an important contribution to our understanding of this vital area. Gerard Goggin, coauthor of Disability in Australia
Disabled characters in 1990s Australian national cinema are both invisible and hypervisible. Existing within the landscape of diversity, as it emerged during the decade's focus on multiculturalism and minority-group interests, these characters are most often used to rehabilitate a previously marginalized other.
This book critically examines numerous Australian films made during the 1990s, with reference to socio-political contexts and influences, to approach the question of disability as a problem with society rather than as one within a damaged body.
It is directed towards researchers in film and disability fields, or anyone else who has an interest in people who exist on the margins of society.
Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a ... more Disability and New Media examines how digital design is triggering disability when it could be a solution. Video and animation now play a prominent role in the World Wide Web and new types of protocols have been developed to accommodate this increasing complexity. However, as this has happened, the potential for individual users to control how the content is displayed has been diminished. Accessibility choices are often portrayed as merely technical decisions but they are highly political and betray a disturbing trend of ableist assumption that serve to exclude people with disability. It has been argued that the Internet will not be fully accessible until disability is considered a cultural identity in the same way that class, gender and sexuality are. Kent and Ellis build on this notion using more recent Web 2.0 phenomena, social networking sites, virtual worlds and file sharing.
Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.
This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital commun... more This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital communications platforms in times of disaster for people with disabilities has the potential to make already life-threatening situations considerably more dangerous. As we are increasingly coming to rely on a social media mash-up of digital platforms to assist in communications during disaster situations, the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities is as dire as if it was high ground during a tsunami or transport during a typhoon. The contemporary social media environment is characterised by a complex and overlapping network of complementary platforms, populated by user-generated content, where people communicate and exchange ideas. In this environment, YouTube videos are posted to Facebook and embedded in blogs, and Twitter is used to link to these other sites and is itself embedded in other platforms. These networks are increasingly supplementing and supplanting more traditional communication platforms, such as the television and radio, particularly in times of disaster. The concern of this paper is that the elements from which this mash-up of communications channels is made are not always accessible to people with disabilities. This evolving network of social media-based communication exposes the limits of existing Internet-based universal design.
Whereas entertainment has featured negatively in the broader NBN debate currently occurring in Au... more Whereas entertainment has featured negatively in the broader NBN debate currently occurring in Australia, within the disability sector it has been recognised as revolutionary. Government, industry and technical analysts describe digital television, particularly that delivered via broadband, as potentially enabling to people with vision and hearing impairments through the more widespread provision of accessibility features such as audio description and closed captions. This article interrogates the approach to accessibility taken by two case studies of broadband-based television: Netflix and catch-up TV. Netflix, which is not officially available in Australia, is often presented as the future of television, while catch-up services provide an example of the current roadband-based television paradigm in this country. Although accessibility features may be available on broadcast television or DVD release, each of these forms of broadband-based television has either previously (Netflix) or currently (catch-up) stripped accessible functions to stream online. The discussion reflects on both activist interventions of people with disability and the industry standards.
With user preference driving the digital innovations of televisions, the opportunities for viewer... more With user preference driving the digital innovations of televisions, the opportunities for viewers with disability to access television via broadband and digital platforms are profound. Viewers with disability have the potential to experience flexibility in the form of accessibility features such as audio descriptions, captions, lip-reading avatars, signing avatars, spoken subtitles and clean audio. This is especially true as digital television and broadband services converge to deliver television services online through sites such as Netflix. Similarly, with television communication becoming increasingly social, people with disability are mobilizing online to advocate for better television accessibility. While some opportunities for accessibility are not being realised, others are arising through the recognition of people with disability as a niche audience.
This article discusses participatory media from a critical disability perspective. It discusses t... more This article discusses participatory media from a critical disability perspective. It discusses the relative absence of explicit discussion and research on disability in the literatures on community, citizen and alternative media. By contrast, disability has emerged as an important element of participatory cultures and digital technologies. To explore disability participatory cultures, the article offers analysis of case studies, including disability blogs, ABC’s Ramp Up website and crowd-funding platforms (such as Kickstarter).
When Jon Snow accuses Tyrion Lannister of not knowing what it is to be a bastard in Season 1 of G... more When Jon Snow accuses Tyrion Lannister of not knowing what it is to be a bastard in Season 1 of Game of Thrones, Tyrion informs him that ‘all dwarves are bastards in their father’s eyes’. Later (in Season 4) he argued that he had been ‘on trial [for being] a dwarf [his] entire life'. His impassioned monologue prompted an equally impassioned Twitter response to #FreeTyrion. This article examines the role of disability in Game of Thrones in the context of both the clear and direct statements made about disability inclusion within the narrative as well as audience response to these depictions. The second aim of this paper is to explore the legitimacy of disability media studies itself and call for a more nuanced approached to disability television analysis in light of both representations of disability in the new televisual landscape exemplified by programmes such as Game of Thrones and the enthusiastic reactions of audiences with disability to such programming. While the social model of disability sought to give some legitimacy to the experience of disability as the social restriction of activity placed on top of people who had impairments rather than simply the experience of a damaged body (Oliver; Finkelstein), within the emerging critical disability studies arena, analysis of culture broadly and television in particular has not received the same level of attention.
This chapter draws upon and critically considers the emergence of children’s toys that have disab... more This chapter draws upon and critically considers the emergence of children’s toys that have disabilities. I focus in particular on Share a Smile Becky and Down Syndrome Dolls. Building on John Fiske’s (1989) argument that objects betray the values of the culture that produce them and that popular culture is intertextal and allows a variety of meaning I read these toys as part of a broader disability (sub)culture of popular culture that has the power to change mainstream cultural beliefs and hence empower people with disability. I link culture to politics and refer to the values and norms of Western societies. I explore some examples of how these toys have been used to investigate the issue of a disability identity in both children with disabilities and those without. Online discussions about these toys provide valuable articulations of the cultural politics of increasing the visibility of disability in popular texts and allow such processes to be understood, interrogated and incorporated into civil rights discourses. Popular culture, including children’s toys, has the power to make permanent change (Gerber 2000, 9).
Flexibility for many viewers comes from digital technologies and their interaction with televisio... more Flexibility for many viewers comes from digital technologies and their interaction with television broadcasting. Significantly, as television is switched to digital transmissions, viewers with disability have the potential to experience flexibility in the form of accessibility features such as audio descriptions, captions, lipreading avatars, signing avatars, spoken subtitles and clean audio. This flexibility may in fact provide some people with access to television for the first time. This exploratory study reports results from an online survey of Australians with disabilities conducted during the final months of the simulcast period before analogue signals were switched off in 2013. While captioning emerged as the most desired accessibility feature, differences surfaced when the data were broken into specific impairment types. This article highlights the importance of digital flexibility specific to impairment type, and locates people with disability as a significant group to consider as more changes take place around digital television broadcasting via the NBN.
This paper examines themes that emerge in discussion of Season 1 The Voice Australia's vision-imp... more This paper examines themes that emerge in discussion of Season 1 The Voice Australia's vision-impaired contestant Rachael Leahcar on The Voice Australia's official YouTube channel. The essay uses Pierre Lévy's conception of information utopia characterized by collective intelligence as a mechanism to examine the way representations of disability are responded to online. The paper outlines three broad themes that emerged in the available social media discourse about Leahcar's performances: first, themes that portray her as an inspirational sweet innocent, second, accusations that she had a competitive edge or ‘sob story’ that others could not compete with and, finally, that people with disabilities are entitled to compensation.
Social media also offered Rachael Leahcar the opportunity to respond to criticisms that she was not disabled enough – a critique often levelled at people with disability seeking accommodations. This paper argues that although Rachael was broadly constructed and interpreted as a ‘supercripple’, the affordances available through both reality television and television's use of social media provide the opportunity to introduce a different type of representation that embraces both incidentalist and non-incidentalist ways of understanding disability.
This year, 2008, marks the tenth anniversary of the portable MP3 player. MPMan F10, the first suc... more This year, 2008, marks the tenth anniversary of the portable MP3 player. MPMan F10, the first such device to utilise the MP3-encoding format, was launched in March 1998 (Smith). However it was not until April 2003 when Apple Inc launched the iPod that the market began the ...
Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, Jan 1, 2007
Abstract: Australian national cinema during the 1990s presented films that constructed disability... more Abstract: Australian national cinema during the 1990s presented films that constructed disability within a personal tragedy model thereby excluding disability from Australian national identity. The individualization of disability is a national project, which encourages the ...
... ECU Publications. Title. A Quest Through Chaos: My Narrative of Illness and Recovery. Authors... more ... ECU Publications. Title. A Quest Through Chaos: My Narrative of Illness and Recovery. Authors. Katie Ellis, Edith Cowan University. Document Type. Journal Article. Faculty. Education and Arts. School. Communications and Contemporary ...
Telecommunications Journal of Australia, Jan 1, 2010
As a disability cultural movement emerged in the 1990s, activists, academics and media producers ... more As a disability cultural movement emerged in the 1990s, activists, academics and media producers argued that people with disability should be in charge of their own image. Further, these images must make the able bodied audience feel uncomfortable in order for social change to ...
Abstract: The philosophical concepts of personal identity and social identity and their influence... more Abstract: The philosophical concepts of personal identity and social identity and their influence on each other and in particular on our sense of selves is amply evident on Facebook, the social networking site. Facebook is an extension of language, and as we participate in it, it ...
Australian Cinema is known for its tendency to feature bizarre and extraordinary characters that ... more Australian Cinema is known for its tendency to feature bizarre and extraordinary characters that exist on the margins of mainstream society (O'Regan 1996, 261). While several theorists have noted the prevalence of disability within this national cinema (Ellis 2008; Duncan, Goggin ...
Telecommunications Journal of Australia, Jan 1, 2010
As a disability cultural movement emerged in the 1990s, activists, academics and media producers ... more As a disability cultural movement emerged in the 1990s, activists, academics and media producers argued that people with disability should be in charge of their own image. Further, these images must make the able bodied audience feel uncomfortable in order for social change to ...
Uploads
Books by Katie Ellis
Gerard Goggin, coauthor of Disability in Australia
Disabled characters in 1990s Australian national cinema are both invisible and hypervisible. Existing within the landscape of diversity, as it emerged during the decade's focus on multiculturalism and minority-group interests, these characters are most often used to rehabilitate a previously marginalized other.
This book critically examines numerous Australian films made during the 1990s, with reference to socio-political contexts and influences, to approach the question of disability as a problem with society rather than as one within a damaged body.
It is directed towards researchers in film and disability fields, or anyone else who has an interest in people who exist on the margins of society.
Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.
Papers by Katie Ellis
catch-up services provide an example of the current roadband-based television paradigm in this country. Although accessibility features may be available on broadcast television or DVD release, each of these forms of broadband-based
television has either previously (Netflix) or currently (catch-up) stripped accessible functions to stream online. The discussion reflects on both activist interventions of people with disability and the industry standards.
The second aim of this paper is to explore the legitimacy of disability media studies itself and call for a more nuanced approached to disability television analysis in light of both representations of disability in the new televisual landscape exemplified by programmes such as Game of Thrones and the enthusiastic reactions of audiences with disability to such programming. While the social model of disability sought to give some legitimacy to the experience of disability as the social restriction of activity placed on top of people who had impairments rather than simply the experience of a damaged body (Oliver; Finkelstein), within the emerging critical disability studies arena, analysis of culture broadly and television in particular has not received the same level of attention.
Social media also offered Rachael Leahcar the opportunity to respond to criticisms that she was not disabled enough – a critique often levelled at people with disability seeking accommodations. This paper argues that although Rachael was broadly constructed and interpreted as a ‘supercripple’, the affordances available through both reality television and television's use of social media provide the opportunity to introduce a different type of representation that embraces both incidentalist and non-incidentalist ways of understanding disability.
Gerard Goggin, coauthor of Disability in Australia
Disabled characters in 1990s Australian national cinema are both invisible and hypervisible. Existing within the landscape of diversity, as it emerged during the decade's focus on multiculturalism and minority-group interests, these characters are most often used to rehabilitate a previously marginalized other.
This book critically examines numerous Australian films made during the 1990s, with reference to socio-political contexts and influences, to approach the question of disability as a problem with society rather than as one within a damaged body.
It is directed towards researchers in film and disability fields, or anyone else who has an interest in people who exist on the margins of society.
Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, prior to the development of social networking applications such as Facebook, YouTube and Second Life. This book discusses an array of such applications that have grown within and alongside Web 2.0, and analyzes how they both prevent and embrace the inclusion of people with disability.
catch-up services provide an example of the current roadband-based television paradigm in this country. Although accessibility features may be available on broadcast television or DVD release, each of these forms of broadband-based
television has either previously (Netflix) or currently (catch-up) stripped accessible functions to stream online. The discussion reflects on both activist interventions of people with disability and the industry standards.
The second aim of this paper is to explore the legitimacy of disability media studies itself and call for a more nuanced approached to disability television analysis in light of both representations of disability in the new televisual landscape exemplified by programmes such as Game of Thrones and the enthusiastic reactions of audiences with disability to such programming. While the social model of disability sought to give some legitimacy to the experience of disability as the social restriction of activity placed on top of people who had impairments rather than simply the experience of a damaged body (Oliver; Finkelstein), within the emerging critical disability studies arena, analysis of culture broadly and television in particular has not received the same level of attention.
Social media also offered Rachael Leahcar the opportunity to respond to criticisms that she was not disabled enough – a critique often levelled at people with disability seeking accommodations. This paper argues that although Rachael was broadly constructed and interpreted as a ‘supercripple’, the affordances available through both reality television and television's use of social media provide the opportunity to introduce a different type of representation that embraces both incidentalist and non-incidentalist ways of understanding disability.