Stressing the Boundaries of Mobile Accessibility

Mobile devices gather the communication capabilities as no other gadget. Plus, they now comprise a wider set of applications while still maintaining reduced size and weight. They have started to include accessibility features that enable the inclusion of disabled people. However, these inclusive efforts still fall short considering the possibilities of such devices. This is mainly due to the lack of interoperability and extensibility of current mobile operating systems (OS). In this paper, we present a case study of a multi-impaired person where access to basic mobile applications was provided in an applicational basis. We outline the main flaws in current mobile OS and suggest how these could further empower developers to provide accessibility components. These could then be compounded to provide system-wide inclusion to a wider range of (multi)-impairments.Comment: 3 pages, two figures, ACM CHI 2013 Mobile Accessibility Worksho

The significance of distance constraints in peasant farming systems with special reference to sub-Saharan Africa

Analysis of agricultural development potential at village level tends to neglect the factor of relative location, compared with the attention paid to physical resources and economic factors. This paper argues that, in African peasant agriculture, distance takes on increasing significance when farming populations are resettled and agglomerated, there being little intensification in evidence. The impacts of agglomeration and excessive ‘journeys to work’ are identified as affecting the quantity and the quality of agricultural labour inputs, the collection of domestic necessities (especially fuelwood), livestock husbandry, and socio-cultural and welfare conditions.\ud \ud Some simple analyses of time-distance relations, such as the ‘effective working day’, are also described, and a model of peasant decision-making with respect to optimizing farm activity location is proposed as a descriptive-explanatory tool. Response to distance problems is considered as part of rural change; and the particular position of peasant women vis-à-vis distance and transport technology is stressed. Data collection methods and descriptive statements of the spatial relationships within a village, or an agro-ecological zone, are outlined within the framework of rapid rural appraisal. Finally, a number of potential solutions to the agro-economic distance problem are briefly discussed—either as changes in farming systems, or as redistributions of the working population. Changes with the greatest potential are intensification and satellite settlements, though both face difficulties in policy and in implementation

Fragmentation and the digital city: An analysis of Vicente Luis Mora's circular 07. Las afueras

This essay juxtaposes three recent publications, Vicente Luis Mora's Circular 07. Las afueras (2007-), Kenneth Goldsmith's Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century (2015), and Jorge Carrión's Barcelona. Libro de los pasajes (2016), in order to explore how contemporary digital technologies construct and fragment urban experience on a global scale. Despite their different political intentions, these three works share a common aesthetic of appropriation, unoriginal quotation, and fragmentation, as they are also all modelled after Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Just like Benjamin did with Paris, each of these works focuses on a particular Western city-Madrid, New York, and Barcelona-now being proposed as paradigmatic representations of urban experience, which is meant to mimic digital media's modularity and disintegration. Goldsmith's use of appropriation is read as a blank endorsement of digital mediation of everyday life, which sits in opposition to Carrión's and Mora's political projects. Circular 07 and Barcelona mix unoriginal writing techniques, like Goldsmith's conceptual writing, with other experimental methods to warn readers against apolitical adoption of digital technologies. Fragmentation is still proposed as the most important aesthetic form of twenty-first century writing, but these two Spanish works strive for its contextualization as a complex mechanism structured around reader/writer subjectivity. Finally, this essay ponders how to consider new reader/ writer subjectivities within the larger context of global cities in late capitalism

A Descriptive Study of Accessibility to Mobile Crisis Services

Mobile crisis services are seen as a secondary modality in provision of health care services. Past research indicated a lack of integration into the health care system and funding as obstructions. Accessing these services is limited to law enforcement, jails, emergency rooms, crisis line phone contacts, and providers. This research explored a mobile crisis service from greater Minnesota as a primary modality in health care services by examining who was accessing the service, voluntary or non-voluntary individuals in relation to hospitalization, and follow up and does this relationship vary by gender, utilizing the chi-square statistical test. Hospitalization and follow up in relation to types of accessibility showed no significant relationship. But the results indicated a significant relationship between types of accessibility, hospitalization, and follow up with using gender as a control variable. The implications of these findings for social work practice include: a) an increase in the number of social workers functioning within crisis services, b) a need for follow up after the initial contact is made 50% of the time, c) 2:1 gender difference in accessing mobile crisis services in greater Minnesota