5386 Web Accessibility & Disability Studies & Training

These are loose ideas floating in my mind. It's a cocktail of free-running, disability theory, YouTube, flexibility training, and my quest for a dissertation topic and a high-paying consulting gig that makes training accessible to more people.

Signed up for Zdenek's class based on his May Seminar presentation: the potentials for research and practical applications in the field seem pretty amazing.

Started the readings, and I've been unable to silence my mind: so many connections. After May Seminar, my training routine was shot. It's been hard getting started, so I returned to Parkour vids (they spark my passion). With the web accessibility class, though, I started looking: virtually none have closed captioning--and many of these have no sound.

This past week, as my training has been getting back to normal--flexibility, running, TKD forms--I've been looking for more stuff. One locus I found was Sonnon's work. Good stuff, especially the relations to flow and parkour. Sonnon's system gets a good write up from Parkour Generations' Dan Edwardes.

Over the past couple days, I've been trying out quietube and accessible twitter, and I like them both better than the originals. They are cleaner and easier to use. Even better, they make my life easy. This leaves me asking, where is accessible training? If I had hearing issues, or a video is poorly made, how could I learn if I can't hear what is said?

A lot of the spirit of Parkour and free-running is about sharing moves, teaching ideas, and expressing your body to its optimum. If the sites, if the videos, if the training is open to that, then it is excluding folks. Of course, you cannot make every move or item open to every single person or disability--that's not possible--however, by simply adding captions or text with muzzy audio, that opens up a greater audience.

One thing I have noticed is that some fitness gurus/systems like Matt Furey and Systema often have poor audio in parts. And I have not seen a single video with closed captioning. Given the aging population, it seems like a wise marketing move--especially with the slower movements, flexibility, and body maintenance/ yoga/ tai chi style systems--to make those available. The population is aging.

Accessible training. That's what I want. And it appears that few folks have been bright enough to seize that market.

Per my work, I think it could be interesting to pursue or examine distance education and web based education in terms of fitness and training. I am particularly interested in video training as it appears to revert to orality and a different style of learning. To be honest, I think designing a fitness series of videos that were designed to be downloaded to people's iPhones or smart phones every day--their daily work out--they could take the phone with them to the gym or park or whatever, watch the demo video, and then do it. If they had any questions, they could refer back to the video. Possibly even open a specific Twitter channel or hashtag for a specific work out.

In terms of rhetoric, fitness and training is heavily audience centered--and it is linked to the marketplace. I do not think academia is particularly interested in the market or training, so the emphasis of my work should be on the communicative and/or interactive nature. One other thing that could be cool is downloading a video training lesson from a menu of hundreds or thousands. And, like the Kindle, once you bought it, it was yours to download at whatever device you had or used.