UMAQ · Understanding Media Accessibility Quality
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-04 → 2020-08-18
- EU contribution
- €158,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Understanding Media Accessibility Quality
One of the major consequences of the information revolution is the increasing pervasiveness and ubiquity of media artefacts (i.e. products, services, and environments) in the most diverse aspects of society. Media artefacts offer an unprecedented opportunity for eliminating discrimination and creating an inclusive society. A crucial role in this scenario is played by media accessibility. As a research area, media accessibility took its first steps within the field of translation studies, and its focus was on overcoming sensory and linguistic barriers for certain social groups. Thanks to a series of factors, including its hybridisation with other fields as well as the radical changes brought about by information and communication technologies, media accessibility has now outgrown those borders and reached a new position. Media access services are now considered to be strategic instruments for guaranteeing the human rights of all, not only those facing sensory or linguistic barriers. For many years, the attention of the main stakeholders has focused on promoting policies and practices that would enable the widespread adoption of media access services (i.e., quantity). More recently, attention has been shifting towards the quality of these services. This new phase acknowledges that providing access services does not automatically guarantee the provision of access, nor of social inclusion. The quality of the experience provided by those services matters as well. However, looking closely at the landscape of quality in media accessibility, the resulting situation is fragmented. This disjointed situation is mostly due to the absence of a theoretical framework for understanding the new position of media accessibility, which in turn affects the understanding of quality in media accessibility. This problem has a real effect on the lives of people, for it may lead to a ghetto effect, exacerbating old forms of exclusion and discrimination or even creating new ones. The urgency of addressing this fragmented situation has been acknowledged by many actors and in many contexts, such as the preparatory documents for the European Accessibility Acts, because non-harmonised approaches to quality in media accessibility could create new social, cultural, and economic barriers.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Media Accessibility (MA) - the research area dealing with the theories, practices, services, technologies and instruments that provide access to media products, services, and environments for people that cannot, or cannot properly, access that content in its original form - is at the core of the most pressing priorities of the European Commission, such as the European Disability Strategy 2010-2020 and the Digital Single Market Strategy. For a long time, policies involving MA have been concerned with quantity, that is, setting quotas for inducing the widespread adoption of MA solutions, e.g. hours per year of subtitled TV programmes. Now that quotas are being met in many EU countries, attention is shifting over to quality. Standardisation is the very instrument through which quality requirements are implemented at a policy level. Unfortunately, accessibility standardisation at a EU level is subject to a fragmented situation due to a plethora of divergent rules. Difficulties in harmonising the various standards, beyond mere differences in terms of national systems, are mainly due to a lack of research: the absence of a theoretical framework for understanding quality in media accessibility. The overall aim of this project is indeed to carry out the first comprehensive analysis of the notion of quality in MA and provide a unified theoretical framework for understanding it. Under the hypothesis that MA groups a series of practices to manage, transform and transfer information, the project will draw on scholarship on information quality and investigate if and how it can help to successfully deal with MAQ. The project will boost a coordinated research programme at an international level and enable the creation of a set of recommendations aimed at strengthening the EU policies, which will in turn benefit all the stakeholders in the accessibility value chain and facilitate the achievement of a Digital Single Market.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA · Cerdanyola Del VallesCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union