ABSTRACT
In Disability and New Media, we explore how the early promise of the World Wide Web of access for all people regardless of disability has been hijacked by more recent developments in the online environment — from web 2.0 to virtual worlds. Many of the studies on disability and the web have focused on the early web, that is 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. The chapters that follow pursue the subject of disability from a number of directions — as integral to the future of the web, as in need of a theoretical revision, and as an opportunity to fully understand the diversity of the human experience.
