Internet Architecture and Disability

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach for fully facilitating Internet accessibility. The prevailing doctrinal approach to Internet accessibility seeks to treat websites as metaphorical “places” subject to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires places of public accommodations to be accessible to people with disabilities. While this place-centric approach to Title III has succeeded to a significant degree in making websites accessible over the last two decades, large swaths of the Internet—more broadly construed to include Internet technologies beyond websites—remain inaccessible to millions of people with a variety of disabilities. As limitations of a place-based approach to Title III become clearer, a new framework for disability law is needed in an increasingly intermediated Internet. Leveraging the Internet-law literature on perspectives, this article recognizes the place-centric approach to Title III as normatively and doctrinally “internal,” in the terminology of Internet-law scholars. It offers a framework for supplementing this internal approach with an external approach that contemplates the layered architecture of the Internet, including its constituent content, web and non-web applications, access networks operated by Internet service providers, and devices and the role of disability and other bodies of law, particularly including telecommunications law and attendant policy issues, such as net neutrality, in making them accessible

Internet Architecture and Disability

The Internet is essential for education, employment, information, and cultural and democratic participation. For tens of millions of people with disabilities in the United States, barriers to accessing the Internet—including the visual presentation of information to people who are blind or visually impaired, the aural presentation of information to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and the persistence of Internet technology, interfaces, and content without regard to prohibitive cognitive load for people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities—collectively pose one of the most significant civil rights issues of the information age. Yet disability law lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach for fully facilitating Internet accessibility. The prevailing doctrinal approach to Internet accessibility seeks to treat websites as metaphorical “places” subject to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires places of public accommodations to be accessible to people with disabilities. While this place-centric approach to Title III has succeeded to a significant degree in making websites accessible over the last two decades, large swaths of the Internet—more broadly construed to include Internet technologies beyond websites—remain inaccessible to millions of people with a variety of disabilities. As limitations of a place-based approach to Title III become clearer, a new framework for disability law is needed in an increasingly intermediated Internet. Leveraging the Internet-law literature on perspectives, this article recognizes the place-centric approach to Title III as normatively and doctrinally “internal,” in the terminology of Internet-law scholars. It offers a framework for supplementing this internal approach with an external approach that contemplates the layered architecture of the Internet, including its constituent content, web and non-web applications, access networks operated by Internet service providers, and devices and the role of disability and other bodies of law, particularly including telecommunications law and attendant policy issues, such as net neutrality, in making them accessible

Copyright and Disability

A vast array of copyrighted works—books, video programming, software, podcasts, video games, and more—remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. International efforts to adopt limitations and exceptions to copyright law that permit third parties to create and distribute accessible versions of books for people with print disabilities have drawn some attention to the role that copyright law plays in inhibiting the accessibility of copyrighted works. However, copyright scholars have not meaningfully engaged with the role that copyright law plays in the broader tangle of disability rights

Copyright and Disability

A vast array of copyrighted works—books, video programming, software, podcasts, video games, and more—remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. International efforts to adopt limitations and exceptions to copyright law that permit third parties to create and distribute accessible versions of books for people with print disabilities have drawn some attention to the role that copyright law plays in inhibiting the accessibility of copyrighted works. However, copyright scholars have not meaningfully engaged with the role that copyright law plays in the broader tangle of disability rights

Regulating Software When Everything Has Software

This Article identifies a profound, ongoing shift in the modern administrative state: from the regulation of things to the regulation of code. This shift has and will continue to place previously isolated agencies in an increasing state of overlap, raising the likelihood of inconsistent regulations and putting seemingly disparate policy goals, like privacy, safety, environmental protection, and copyright enforcement, in tension. This Article explores this problem through a series of case studies and articulates a taxonomy of code regulations to help place hardware-turned-code rules in context. The Article considers the likely turf wars, regulatory thickets, and related dynamics that are likely to arise, and closes by considering the benefits of creating a new agency with some degree of centralized authority over software regulation issues

The first detection of the 232 GHz vibrationally excited H2O maser in Orion KL with ALMA

We investigated the ALMA science verification data of Orion KL and found a spectral signature of the vibrationally excited H2O maser line at 232.68670 GHz (nu2=1, 5,5,0-6,4,3). This line has been detected in circumstellar envelopes of late-type stars so far but not in young stellar objects including Orion KL. Thus, this is the first detection of the 232 GHz vibrationally excited H2O maser in star-forming regions. The distribution of the 232 GHz maser is concentrated at the position of the radio Source I, which is remarkably different from other molecular lines. The spectrum shows a double-peak structure at the peak velocities of -2.1 and 13.3 km s-1. It appears to be consistent with the 22 GHz H2O masers and 43 GHz SiO masers observed around Source I. Thus, the 232 GHz H2O maser around Source I would be excited by the internal heating by an embedded protostar, being associated with either the root of the outflows/jets or the circumstellar disk around Source I, as traced by the 22 GHz H2O masers or 43 GHz SiO masers, respectively.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

The informal learning of new teachers in school

The purpose of this paper is to present what the study of the experiences of beginning teachers and their informal learning says about the process of learning to teach, and to discuss the main emerging themes in relation to a wider literature. The design of the paper is essentially ethnographic and building of grounded theory, based on an accumulation of data derived from interviews with beginning teachers and connecting to extant theory. The findings are that a focus on the informal learning of beginners in teaching leads to the notion of learning as becoming that is predominantly emotional and relational in nature with the emergence of teacher identity. The research is limited in its exploration of the cognitive dimension of professional learning, a dimension which may be elicited using a more tightly focused and structured method. The implications are that learning to teach is not determined by a professional standard and that a revised standard would need to take account of these findings. The value of the paper lies in the pursuit of informal learning as a research area in teaching to reveal a greater complexity of learning in that specific professional context; and showing how the understanding of learning to teach can be enriched through a wider appreciation of the school as workplace, workplace learning and connections to a wider philosophical literature