Showcase of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors (SOURCE)

Digital Access as a Socioculturally Minded Process: a Literature Review

“Access” has many meanings in digital media and rhetoric studies, and many scholars approach it differently. This literature review seeks to highlight the need for greater awareness of a more cultural approach to access. It is crucial to understand the presence of the physical human body, even in digital spaces, as identity often defines how we approach and interact with media and digital discourses. In studies of access to digital information, we approach a crucial question: how present is the human body in online spaces? When we enter digital spaces, does the body fade? How does our sociocultural status affect our access to digital information? Free and “available” information that is not adapted to as many bodies as possible still fails to be accessible. Accessibility is also a continuous practice, requiring continued study and adjustment to provide access to as many people as possible. This poster reviews and synthesizes past and current approaches to media accessibility, focusing on scholarship in digital and cultural rhetorics such as Angela Haas’ “Toward a Digital Cultural Rhetoric” and other scholarship from disability and accessibility studies, such as work by Melanie Yergeau. This project seeks to highlight the need for a more process-oriented view of access in digital media, ultimately concluding that the study and practice of media accessibility must become more socioculturally contextualized.