Multimedia: Enhancing Ability
Léonie Watson
Introduction
Whilst multimedia in many guises can appear to be an obstacle for people with disabilities, it should not be discounted as a means of enhancing the user experience for everybody, including those with disabilities. This article looks at two ways in which multimedia can be used to benefit people with different impairments.
Cognitive Impairments
According to the Dyslexia Institute 10% of the UK population are affected by some form of Dyslexia. Of these, 4% have serious Dyslexia, including 375,000 school children.
Dyslexia not only restricts a person's ability to read text, but may also manifest itself in the form of difficulty with numeracy or organisational skills. This of course can present considerable obstacles for someone engaged in the education process, leaving a legacy of inadequately informed school leavers entering the working sector.
Multimedia can help in a remarkably simple way. Where information is given as text, the simple act of accompanying the written information with a video presentation of a person reading that information aloud can make all the difference. The ability to absorb the given text through another medium is incredibly powerful. It negates the need for a Dyslexic student to rely on the text alone and provides a multimodal means of relaying that information to the brain, placing control back in the hands of the student.
It is worth noting that a multi modal approach to learning can be beneficial to everybody. Each person has a distinctive learning style, this is the mode in which they learn things most easily. One person may prefer to visualise information in diagrammatic form, whilst another will find a spoken explanation of the same data easier to absorb.
Hearing Impairments
The Royal National Institute for the Deaf estimates there are over 9 Million people with moderate or profound hearing problems in the UK. Of these over 20,000 are of school age, whilst 3.5 Million are of working age.
Many people with hearing difficulties will lip read to understand what someone is saying. What doesn't occur to many people is that it is not possible to lip read and jot down some notes simultaneously. The logical solution is to provide a transcript or previously formulated notes to give to a hearing impaired person, but with multimedia, there is a better way.
It is common for companies around the world to use multimedia video as a method of delivering presentations and lectures. With technology as it stands it is possible to provide a start stop mechanism on any digital presentation, permitting a person with hearing difficulties to watch the screen, lip read the spoken word and then briefly pause the video in order to take notes. The advantages of this are twofold: Firstly the person is able to understand the content and context of the presentation as it happens and if captioning has been provided in real time then this is markedly more noticeable. Secondly, they can read the expressions on the face of the presenter, giving them a far greater appreciation of the emotional meaning behind the words; something that cannot be identified from reading a text transcript.
Conclusion
The two cases highlighted above are just a slight scratch on the surface of what can be accomplished with multimedia, both in the workplace and education. As technology advances, so does the ability to ensure that multimedia can be used for the benefit of all people, be they blind or sighted, deaf or hearing, Dyslexic or otherwise.
Related Resources
Challenges to Learning
- Attention and concentration difficulties
- Memory and recall difficulties
- Language and comprehension difficulties
- Auditory difficulties
Case Studies
- Léonie - Accessibility consultant and part-time degree student, who is blind
- Creating an Accessible Flash Game for the RNIB