MAP’s VISION is a world where everyone is given access to media. This can only be achieved through an immense global effort, facilitated by sharing information regarding practices, services, technologies, and instruments in media accessibility.
Media accessibility has become a key issue in the worldwide agenda on social and cultural inclusion policies, practices and research. Many national and international institutions have been drafting or approving specific legislation, recommendations and guidelines. Social organisations have been lobbying and raising awareness about this issue; the industry has been developing new technical solutions; researchers have been testing access services, carrying out reception studies, suggesting new approaches to accessibility studies and to accessibility methodology in research, and providing training in the various modalities linked to media accessibility. All of these efforts have produced a massive amount of information on media accessibility from a variety of perspectives that is constantly – and rapidly – increasing. Unfortunately, most of this information cannot be easily found and accessed because it is fragmented amongst different repositories and languages. This is having a negative impact on the development of a unified research and policy agenda that can tackle the challenge of creating a globally-inclusive society.
With this in mind, MAP’s MISSION is to provide a unified atlas charting the worldwide landscape of media accessibility through the creation of a structured platform that acts as a hub for research, policies, training and practices in this field.
MAP is structured into five main sections:
- Research: contains information about past and current research projects, publications and presentations in workshops and conferences.
- Training: tracks formal and informal courses in Higher Education institutions, MOOCs and professional training courses.
- Events: includes information about past, current and future conferences, seminars, workshops and other events related to media accessibility.
- Modalities: all data in MAP is displayed in this section according to different media accessibility modalities.
- Accessometer: provides a world map of the legislation, standards and guidelines on media accessibility organised by country. At its current stage/For the time being, this section focuses exclusively on media access services regarding sensorial barriers though not linguistic ones.
- News: covers the latest developments in media accessibility.