ABSTRACT

We began this book with the often-cited Tim Berners-Lee quote regarding the importance of accessibility in order to create the most powerful web experience possible. Although a well-known quote that has been described as causing web developers’ “eyelids to droop and their thoughts to turn to that cutie in Accounts with the tight jeans” (Lawson, 2006), it has not been similarly overused in disability, media, and cultural studies. While these disciplines and the cultural investigation of the web in the emerging fi eld of internet studies have focused on the creation of a digital divide based on culturally specifi c yet arbitrary standards of humanness, a consideration of disability as it is socially created is conspicuously absent.