Accessing Rhetoric

Captions are linear representations of language that affirm normative ideas of how a dominant, hearing culture understands and represents sound, signifying sounds through written English, following an English-centric logic in a transcript's grammar and syntax. Such reasonable modifications may prohibit authentic participation when a student's primarily form of communication is ASL, whose grammar differs dramatically. Further, we might consider, as Jay Dolmage (2008) suggested, ways that accommodations attempt to "normalize" our perceptions of composition and perpetuate a myth of "natural learning."

Hear a hierarchy: 1) Hearing is most natural. 2) Reading captions is close.

Kirsten describes the hearing world.

The hearing world is—the real world outside of my comfort bubble. This comfort bubble is full of my family, my home, friends—I'm familiar with them. The world outside that bubble (the hearing world) has people who don't really know about the deaf population or sign language. They really don't have knowledge or a commonsense connected to that. It can become really frustrating sometimes when trying to interact when they don't understand or they're not understanding.

It's a really frustrating communication process full of misunderstandings; many different things can happen. It's a harsh reality, but the bright side, I've had to learn how to survive on my own, to take my hearing knowledge and skills and learn how to get by in life. It's given me the ability to be tough and to take care of myself and get around in the hearing world. And I've been able to learn survival skills necessary for the future.

Terms such as "accommodation" and "modification" naturalize and affirm power, dominance, and privilege in normate bodies, emboldening boundaries between veiled normate and identified disabled bodies. By this, we suggest that calls for accommodations or modifications belie assumptions that dominant responses to soundwriting and soundlistening are normal. And in doing so, dominant culture positions a normate body—that is, sound as experienced by hearing–speaking bodies—as dominant and the deaf body as other, requiring adaptations.

"Personally, I found my own embodied perception of sound as a bias that limited my notions of soundwriting affordances. And my experience working with Kirsten emphasized my own strange body, reorienting my sense of sound in our interactions. In an effort to make strange a hearing world's understanding of sound, I invited our class to interact with sound, without sound." — Jennifer

An inhospitable, shared experience in class initiated our discussions about access and sound. On the day of our experiment, we responded to a brief video. We watched a video whose sound was muted; soon students were disgruntled. Minutes later, we reviewed the muted video with a transcript in hand. Students struggled to keep up with a print transcript and video screen, missing most of both while they toggled between texts. Their tolerance for inaccessibility was brief, and they began to recognize that most texts were always accessible for them. Quickly, a room full of English majors well trained to detect and defend non-dominant prejudice through race, class, or gender orientation started recognizing our exercise as a new kind of othering they had never considered. This exercise was followed by our study of Melanie Yergeau et. al's (2013) Kairos piece titled "Multimodality in Motion." From this reading stemmed a class deconstruction of our dominant notions of design, our perceptions of modal affordances (i.e., sound is always…), and our recognition of diverse perceptions of sound.

Kirsten describes her experience in Multimodal Composition.

Well, I remember when I first enrolled in Dr. Buckner's multimodal sound class. I initially didn't realize that the class would be connected to sound, that we would be studying sound. And when I realized we would be, my first thought was, "Oh, no. My professor will have extra work and have to adjust things in order to meet my needs. Will she hate me? I don't know what to do. Why did I sign up for this class?"

But, the professor approached me one day and asked me if we could work together. So, I agreed. And I realized through that time that she could meet my needs. But also I could benefit from the same learning experience as my classmates.

At first I was rather surprised because, honestly, I had never encountered any other professor who was willing to put in all this work to try meet my needs. It didn't matter how much extra work, she was willing to do it and help give me the full learning experience of studying sound. So we worked together through the sound unit as the class progressed.

And I remember one day in class we were studying "Multimodality in Motion" (Yergeau et al., 2013) related to disability things. And that day when the professor showed and we were studying that it was truly an eye-opening time for all my classmates. Also, for me—I was learning from it too. Having that learning experience so far really touched and amazed my classmates. We all realized what a difference it makes. Every student's learning experience is different. It always applies to everyone differently, and that applies to sound.

In addition to dedicating a portion of the course to discussing issues of accessibility, we reviewed the course's new accessibility policy, requiring student projects provide redundant modalities and points of access for diverse users. It was not enough that these undergraduates learn how to listen or soundwrite; a new media composer needed to recognize audiences whose bodies responded differently and must attempt to design projects that can be more accessible from inception.

ENGL 429 Accessibility Policy in Syllabus (Spring 2015)

We will discuss issues of accessibility in this class, especially with consideration for users with disabilities. In the spirit of the Rehabilitation Act, I will ask that you provide texts that are accessible to individuals with disabilities in so much as it doesn't create undue hardship on your project(s). This means providing information like alt text to images, closed captioning for video, and transcripts for audio. We will explore the functional process of formatting your projects for accessibility together. As a result, I hope that you will gain an awareness of how texts are experienced uniquely with each audience.

Our class enthusiastically welcomed workshops on captioning videos, creating transcripts for sound, and locating auxiliary files in web texts for user access. Our sensory-opening experience led many students to a heightened awareness of accessibility with sound. Katie, another student in the class, responded to that week's activities on her blog, where she wrote, "It's a multimodal arrogance for a producer/consumer to think that their response to modalities is true for all. If this were true, no new thought would ever occur" (Hudson, 2014).

In sonic terms, I think this is where we drop the mic.