Our first posting will focus on the issue of technology and media accessibility.
Accessibility is often seen as solely a problem for small
groups of people with specific physical or mental
handicaps. Although it is true that these groups will face more
pressing problems than most of us, in reality we all are dealing with
accessibility issues in one form or the other. Think about the
classical problem humanity has collectively stumbled into in the late
20th century of programming a video recorder. Were we too stupid to
understand these artifacts or is it an “engineer from hell problem”
where the fetishistic featurism of a nerd has incapacitated us all?

We are a group of researchers with an interest in the relationship
between humans and artifacts that have been asked by the organizers
of this public event to share our thoughts on accessibility and
future technologies. We are: Pilar Orero, who lectures at the Faculty
of Translation at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is an
expert on nonsense literature but since that has limited social
applications she has decided to gear her research interests in her
other professional job: audiovisual translation. Within this broad
area nowadays we can find the newborn field “digital media
accessibility” which has now become the main interest for both her
teaching and research. Paul Verschure is trained as a psychologist
who after working in the Netherlands, the United States and
Switzerland has landed as in Barcelona as a research professor of the
Catalan Institute of Advanced Studies and is located at the
Technology Department of the University Pompeu Fabra. Paul is also
Director for the research program of Interactivity, Intelligence and
Perception at the Foundation Barcelona Media. Paul’s first local
accessibility problem was to get a telephone.
Further we have on board Raquel Navarro and Joaquim Llisterri.
They will introduce themselves in a separate posting.