CA11y Project Description

Our communication is increasingly mediated through the creation and consumption of digital content such as videos, podcasts and myriad forms of social media. Access to digital content has become integral to our social and civic participation in society. Much of this creation and consumption, however, is not equally accessed by all.

People with accessibility needs face several challenges in accessing digital content and are therefore at risk of isolation. Accessibility capabilities for digital content are typically viewed through the lens of standards such as subtitles and audio description. While these are helpful for some users, digital content still introduces challenges for many with a range of diverse needs. Our work seeks to consider how we can better support the needs of people with aphasia - a complex communication impairment which typically follows a stroke and can affect speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Working with people with aphasia, as an 'exemplar' population, CA11y (Content Accessibility) aims to explore the design of bespoke accessibility solutions, based on a given individual’s exact needs, to support access to digital content. CA11y proposes a shift in how we consider the provision of accessible digital content.

CA11y will envision and develop technologies that allow for highly-responsive content, unique to each individual’s accessibility needs. Simultaneous, individual renderings of content will allow us to explore previously unconsidered accessibility solutions (e.g see BBC's Object-Based Media vision). Some examples of this might be, for instance, to support users who face challenges with understanding the spoken word, we might limit the background noise in a radio drama to make the actor’s voice clearer. We might slow a news ticker to support easier reading comprehension. Or, we might completely reconfigure content so that scenes with complex dialogue or textual descriptions are removed.

The overall objective of CA11y is to envision, co-design, develop and evaluate novel approaches to digital content provision in which each user’s experience of digital content is completely individual and responds to their accessibility needs. The specific sub-objectives of this work are to:

1. Understand the digital content accessibility needs for people with aphasia, and contextualise this within current technological capabilities

2. Co-design innovative prototypes which embody approaches to supporting the accessible configuration and experience of digital content for people with aphasia

3. Evaluate the efficacy of the prototypes with a range of users with aphasia which have diverse lanugage needs

4. Develop an open-source toolkit and training programme which embodies the approaches developed, with a view to widening impact and supporting those with wider access needs