48 Hours to make animation accessible

From Firenze University Press Journal: Media Education — Studi, ricerche e buone pratiche

Enrico Bisenzi, Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma

Alessandro Carducci, Cardeis Art

Accessibility as a principle is a decidedly vast concept: widespread are architectural accessibility solutions such as inclined planes or elevators to assist the mobility of people who use wheelchairs. But in a broader sense, accessibility includes solutions for all types of difficulties presented by some kind of disability (For example, also consider the concept of accessible tourism that proposes to guarantee a dignified experience extended to those with sensory difficulties or personal mobility).Accessibility has recently left room for the concept of Inclusive Design, moving on from the concept of Universal Design (Preiser & Smith , 2011) in favor of inclusive design (Gilbert, 2019), taking into consideration not only permanently disabled people as we commonly mean (deaf, blind, etc.) but any person who experiences difficulty due to a temporary disability or unfavorable environmental condition with a particular user experience (UX).

The Inclusive Designer therefore has the difficult task of adapting a User Interface (UI) (Schneider-Hufschmidt et al., 1993) in order to meet the needs of “any” person regardless of permanent or temporary conditions (Browne, 2016). We remind you that the derogatory term “handicap” derives from horse racing, where a particularly good English jockey would hold his hand in the hat (Hand in the cap) to make the bets more unpredictable, and into other sports as an athlete accepts a disadvantage to level the playing field. However, it can also include such cases as the mobility level of a parent’s arms who is carrying a small child, or a person who is otherwise young and very healthy but while dancing in the disco finds it impossible do understand a videowall projection of a movie because the audio is overpowered by music and dancing.Refugees and travelers, people ‘too’ young or ‘too’ elderly, those with little education or learning disabilities … for these and many other reasons they can benefit from inclusive design to take advantage of communication and information systems with solutions that treat these situations culturally (Ting-Toomey, 2010). (Certainly, you will agree that a video in Korean will be decidedly more understandable to us all thanks to English subtitles…). This was our design approach: to assemble a kit of existing solutions and others present-ed in an innovative way to ensure the availability of an animation to any person regardless of environmental or disability conditions (whether temporary or permanent) in which that animation might be found.

An ambitious and difficult goal, but which gave us great satisfaction starting with a recent encounter with Patrizia Ceccarani , Scientific Technical Director of the Alloy of Golden Thread, who has long been involved in assisting people with plurisensorial and cognitive disabilities. She graciously gave us a valuable advice (which had not occurred to us) to better satisfy the needs of people with limited peripheral vision.It is particularly difficult to create accessible alias inclusive digital animations, as videos and animations are characterized by a plurality of multi-sensory inputs. These inputs are often presented quickly and in succession. Perhaps for this reason there has not yet been experimental research. So especially for this reason, we invite the community of developers and creators of digital animations and also disability specialists and inclusive designers to consider our operational proposal, by critiquing or questioning it if necessary. In this article, we first present some basic principles of accessibility, and than we present our toolkit and its features to make animations accessible to disabled people, presenting a direct experience of production.We focused on digital animations because it can be made with less economic effort than video, which needs more technical and even professional resources for their production. Digital animation is ‘determinable’ in every little detail and narrative moment, being able to precisely define alternative storytelling useful to meet the needs of different kinds of disabled people (Head, 2016).

With animation, everything is possible, everything is reversible. The nature of animation goes beyond the laws of physics; its expressive force and its universal communication language are timeless, and its artistic and technical forms are always current (Nurizmawati et al., 2015). It adapts to any category and tar-get and in this way is particularly useful for educational activities (Mittiga, 2018) and purposes. In synthesis, digital animation is a flexible language greatly appreciated not only by children (Brandell, 1988) but also by people with cognitive disabilities, both of them often in a position to learn. Therefore, digital animation can be designed in a very detailed way to produce short or very short communication products that are widely appreciated by anyone within educational contexts. We hope with our inclusive design toolkit to sup-port the on-going cultural revolution that is spreading all over the world among artists and technicians with the aim to support people with access to information and communication. Blind people, deaf people (Heller, 2013), color blind people, epileptics, autistic, and young students suffering of specific learning disorders all have the right to access and use digital information and communication media.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/me-12029

Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/med/article/view/12029