Text-plus-image posts get read more carefully, disadvantaging vision-impaired users

Evidence

Like webcammers, LiveJournal users often supplement their texts with high-quality digital images, and sometimes even forego text altogether. For the generation of Web users who grew up with digital photography, this has been a boon. Others feel differently. Mia Lipner, who grew up using textonly bulletin board systems in cyberspace, feels that the LiveJournal bias of “reading more carefully the words of people who put images with their text” disturbingly mirrors her experience in the offline world as a blind woman. “People don’t acknowledge my presence (waiters asking my friends what I want to order, etc.),” Mia explains, “not because they can’t see me, but because I can’t see them (or myself).” — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls, 175

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether participatory culture structurally re-inscribes offline bodily hierarchies (lookism, ableism) despite its rhetoric of democratized voice is worth chasing.
• XREF: Echo of the immodesty/dress-signaling interests (images as identity markers) and of how the body’s visual legibility orders attention. — connects to: Poor vision can stem from brain-based impairments trainable by apps
• SEED: Article angle: the image-bias of participatory media as an overlooked accessibility failure — how the turn toward photographic selfhood marginalized users whose self-presentation is text-only.

Broader Connections

• Poor vision can stem from brain-based impairments trainable by apps #complicates (0.72)