Guest Editors' Introduction: Accessibility and Assistive Technologies

Integrating disabled individuals into society, with dignity, is an ancient social issue. And while each person who is born with or acquires a disability faces an immediate and urgent crisis, society is slow to fix chronic problems even after discovering solutions. This situation is especially tragic considering that some individuals might spend an entire life attempting to surmount problems that already have been solved simply because the institutions in charge of change don't find the problem urgent enough to implement the known solution. For example, solutions exist to solve the information-access problems faced by disabled individuals, but content producers see no urgency in addressing the fundamental issues. Media-production processes must change to incorporate the already-existing solutions, which, for the most part, have minimal costs.