The Blind Side: Addressing Instagram’s accessibility oversights

Accessibility is a word that populates our daily surroundings, primarily as an assurance that everyone’s needs have been considered. We spend a considerable amount of time accessing our digital devices that grant stimulus but it must also be asserted that the sensual experience offered can be considered anything but uniform.

Today’s sensory experience is characterised not only by how the digital has changed our bodies and minds but also how it accommodates and shapes the particulars of our lifestyle and access. Sense is not only made meaningful by modes of entertainment or information, but by the identities that form the content, we consume on practicality, novelty, and interest. 

Devices, commodities and environment, are all crucial to a worldly experience: they delineate how and who participates, who gets left behind, and how we construe access.

Our ways of perceiving the world are subjective, yet historically dominated by the audiovisual. Although this claim is conflicting, it’s attributed to the contention that while humans work through multimodal perception, it favours vision, then hearing and haptic stimuli—in a lower percentage—to create an account of reality. Hence, it is important to acknowledge our inclination for the audiovisual: in understanding its prevalence, we understand its normalising.  

For example, accessibility features, in the iPhone offer options for visual and hearing disabilities. However, these are limited and not focused on non-essential vision or hearing. In these features, it’s easy to notice an emphasis on optics, something understood on a device designed to be navigated by a visual interface, no matter how key the use of other senses is. 

Many have played with the colour display, touch sensitivities, or perhaps helped our parents set up a bigger font. However, most aren’t dependent on-screen reading or audio descriptions. If confronted, these dependencies show our devices provide no real accessibility.

Accounts showcasing how people with full visual or hearing impairments use their devices, manifest stories of ingenuity, but not of complete integration. Countless blogs and videos show how groups, like the “blind”, incorporate things like social media into their lives in a meaningful way. Nevertheless, the “how”, always involves practicality by people who deal with adapting to the world, rather than the world adapting to them.

Adaptability is a key concept: we create alternatives but not accessibility. We allow mediums to become operable, but never attain true synthesis. In this tricky conversation, we can examine the perennial debates: is egalitarianism, not generalisation? Should we adapt the general world for all, or for the specific experiences of all? Do we adopt options to access or dedicated alternatives?

The present digital landscape offers space for self-critical arguments towards its improvements, given that it is designed to foster democratic mediums of open communication. Yet it continues to slide away from its rural beginnings: we are experiencing the capitalistic reconfiguration of the digital, and as in a city, the places that reflect our most inner desires, are now facades for atrophied sensory experience.

The concept of dedicated alternatives, seems most resonant with contemporary ideology, along with the interest in representation and identity. However, we must also face sensory degradation: is this not because of our limited construction of a worldly experience? The digisphere is a continuation of hegemony, while technological achievements promised greater value. Shouldn’t we reintroduce people into a world of five senses rather than some into the limited digital?

Let’s focus on the king of visual content: Instagram. Is there an Instagram for the blind? Consider “blindness” here as a concept, and not strictly by definition, to concentrate on the abstract and not determine or omit a variety of experiences. 

VoiceOver features and Instagram’s AI image description is a telling experience. My own exercise, ironically limited by my device’s ability, brought silly examples of an irrelevant feature that nevertheless can’t be discounted. Here are some of the image descriptions generated from the explore tab:

 “Image may contain night”

“Photo may contain shoes”

“Image may contain one or more people”

“Image may contain one person standing”

“Photo may contain stripes and indoors”

Instagram is designed as a visual medium. It shouldn’t necessarily be adapted to the point of being accessible to everyone. However, there should be a space dedicated to other stimuli as prominent and normalised as Instagram.

By alternating the visual, what has happened with audio? We engage with music, e-books and podcasts. Podcasting is the digitally native and on-demand evolution of radio. It serves as an extension of conversational culture, where every interest can get extensively discussed. 

As podcasting becomes an all serving commodity, it becomes more relevant in understanding current sensual experience. The boom of the podcast is not to be attributed only to its specialisation in a subject, but also to its easy consumption. It does not require substantial amounts of attention, time, or continuity to be rewarding. The audible experience is treasured as an efficient yet swooning asset. Audio serves not only as content but as companionship. In a time where products become experiences, music becomes moods, and dining conceptual, it’s only natural radio would become a non-objective, psyche-driven stimulus. 

We can dig deeper into our relationship with audio through appliances such as Alexa, Google Home, and others in the market. The effort to create the “AI companion” still feels enamoured with sci-fi. Just think about visions like Joi, in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) or Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). These examples flaunt an appetite for the futuristic AI as an intimate associate.

None of this speaks of a singular resurgence of audio, as we look at mediums like TikTok, a video-centric parallel for micro-content. A concept not only defining short-lived and easy to navigate content but also the scope of its audience. As our niches become smaller, will audio not become minuscule too? Could podcasting become the next gig economy? The next personal blog? Our Instagram for the blind?

While inclusion within experience remains vague, while there is no interruption in an audiovisual authority; our lifestyles will continue to reaffirm our devices, and our devices to define our means of sensory consumption. The last decade’s successes in representation, communication, and democratic intent, cannot falter as the postmodern becomes a gridlock, identity a commodity, and the internet a place with no public commons. The values of contemporary ideology are not yet emancipated. 

If influenced by our lifestyles, a worldly expression can be directed or even dictated. Our cultural action cannot continue to be unconscious, accidental, or subversive-for-subversion’s sake. The sensual experience we covet must face the deception felt towards today’s standard.

“Instagram for the Blind” is a conception of improbable access to an already distant place — One that already exists as an impaired visual experience. Attempting to understand representation cannot be equated to accessibility. 

Although we have been removed from our “natural” past with only bare essentials, the technological overlap of our lives can be reconciled. Ownership over the way we navigate the world is the reality of access and representation.