Meryl Alper (2017). Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

ISBN 9780262533973

Reviewed by Chelsea Temple Jones

University of Regina

chelsea [dot] jones [at] ryerson.ca

“Voice” is a tricky concept. There is no consensus on its meaning, yet disabled people are the prospective recipients of it through research, campaigns, and other celebrated propositions of “giving voice.” Meryl Alper’s book, Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality opens by flashing through familiar headlines: “Technology Helps Autistic 12-Year-Old Find Voice …” and others that parade objects—not people—as supporting communication (p. 1). Disabled people (youth, in particular) are routinely heralded as beneficiaries of voice-giving technologies (p. 3). This is where Alper steps in. As she describes it, this book is about what happens after the headlines: when we critically face the structural inequalities embedded in “voice,” and complicate questions of digital equity with concerns about privilege.

Alper chronicles 16 months of observations and interviews with disabled non-speaking youth and their family members in Los Angeles. She meets these people outside of classrooms and therapy sessions to learn about their experiences of technology at home. In these encounters, Alper follows capital’s flow through technical and social domains (p. 11), and in so doing ultimately argues for conversations about communication technology that go beyond the achievements of accessible design to include intersectional analyses. With a focus on race and class, Giving Voice includes a thorough run-down of the indignities experienced by working-class families navigating communication technologies and their interconnected bureaucratic systems (p. 155). Each family uses an iPad and, to various degrees, the text-to-speech program Proloquo2Go (often under the clinical gaze of speech-language pathology). Some benefit from communication technology more than others, sometimes based on parents’ skills: some tech-savvy parents collect and relish in up-to-date on new technologies; others struggle to learn the Proloquo2Go platform on borrowed iPads. These types of binaries seem common, and readers wobble back and forth between white middle-class families’ experiences and everyone else’s. Importantly, families that access borrowed iPads, or speak a different language than the professionals around them, or can’t get the hang of Proloquo2Go even with Guided Access YouTube tutorials, are never overlooked (p. 97). The iPad is an example of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology that isn’t always desirable. Even so, many disabled people and their families must live, and communicate, alongside technological interventions.

The families in Alper’s work often engage with speech technology under heavy, paternalistic surveillance by their children’s schools. Alper points out that less privileged parents have little decision-making power over their children’s communication (p. 104). “It is disconcerting,” Alper writes, “that the use of the iPad as a communicative tool is more likely to be controlled by school districts among less privileged children” (p. 104). And, as she sits with families, Alper encounters parents—mothers, in particular—who feel responsible for impairing their children if they accidentally leave the house without the iPad (p. 44). Alper also points out that research on technology is also research on the ways in which people experience connections (p. 33). This includes research moments where her “heart ached” or where she missteps or misspeaks (p. 117). Borrowing a phrase from an interviewee, Alper admits that to be part of this research “you’ve gotta be plugged in” to be included in conversations about technology and disability—and not everyone is connected to the world of disability media, or wants to be (p. 149). However, Alper maintains a sharp, critical edge to her study. She reminds us that the categorization of some technologies as “assistive” and others as not is a political choice (p. 13). One parent, at least, notes that emphasis on verbalization distracts from her child’s other forms of expression (p. 142). Other parents can’t buy into technological promises of voice: “I want his sound back. I don’t want him to tap on an iPad,” one parent in Alper’s data says of her child (p. 47). Some interviewees reveal that their disabled children love wordplay and multimedia, even if they do not speak (p. 116). But, it is often exhausting for families to convince experts “that their non-speaking children could relate to others, feel, and think” (p. 121). This point is driven home in Alper’s outlier stories, like that of the kid whose doctor finally starts paying attention when he speaks using his iPad (p. 106). Alper’s findings reveal that when technologies support communication, even this support highlights deficit: for non-speaking autistic youth the iPad helps demonstrate normative emotional skills such as empathy. And, for intellectually disabled youth, the iPad lets them show off their intelligence (p. 111, p. 114). In this sense, iPads supplement ableist assumptions about disabled youth, rather than doing much to address ableism.

Giving Voice also goes off-route, directing us away from “voice” toward its addenda. For instance, in the third chapter, Alper redirects our attention toward an object study of iPad cases. This chapter stands out for the sudden focus on the often-overlooked “digital skins” that hold meaning for iPad AAC users (p. 81). Cases, she argues, must be understood through institutional politics and the social meanings they carry; they underscore a “fragile” relationship between people and their services (p. 67, p. 79, p. 80). For instance, cases might signify a presumption of incompetence: they are often mandatorily in place to protect the technology from people assumed incapable of handling it. Students borrowing iPads from their school districts, for example, are at risk of being deemed incompetent if the thing breaks (p. 69). Alper names cases as objects that signify institutional priorities. Some cases can improve augmented voice quality and sit in as helpful addenda to the iPads (p. 72). Other cases may make it harder for users to work with the device; yet in some instances cases are mandatory, demonstrating an institution’s privileging of technology over the user (p. 75). In this chapter, Alper interrogates the word “case” and its meanings, commenting on the relational elements of durability, and the class status cases come to symbolize. She “[makes] the case for making cases strange” (p. 65), and holds that accessories to technology are objects through which “identity and personhood are negotiated” (p. 81).

In another unexpected turn, Alper offers us a new media trope: “paternalistic discourses of technology as an equalizer of opportunity and access” (p. 1). Though she moves past pejorative headlines, Alper’s analysis contributes to our understandings of how disability is taken up in mainstream media. Arguably, the widespread “narratives of personal liberation” that open the book (p. 27) are so pervasive they could be added to a list of media tropes alongside the supercrip, for instance. Here, the story goes that “mere access” to technologies can fix, or overcome, impairment—often by proving competence (p. 23, p. 62, p. 159). It is assumed that parents and children alike are comfortable with technology, and the timelines for children’s progress with these interventions are accelerated (p. 141). Alper’s research tells us otherwise. Alper reminds us that such media coverage continually ignores class distinctions, and features privileged families with access to money, time, stability, and resources (p. 148). Such stories distract from disabled people’s experiences of technology as “ordinary or even mundane’ (p. 3), and, to paraphrase Alper, get in the way of asking complicated questions about the social and political contexts of technology in disabled people’s lives (p.3). “As long as the media treats voice as a singular and individual entity,” Alper writes, “issues regarding who in the household is responsible for promoting and protecting nonspeaking children’s voices go unaddressed” (p. 62).

We are no closer to a consensus about the meaning of “voice” by the time the book ends. Instead, we are left with multiple readings of “voice” that can inform what it means for Disability Studies to face the prospect of “giving” or being given voice. Voice is political (p. 55). It is also relational, with deep ties to family and identity (p. 64, p. 162). Voice is embodied, and surfaces as both an individual and social construct (p. 42). Voice is performative, and technologized voice comes with socially constructed meanings (p. 62). Usually, this technologized voice is reserved for Western, English-speaking, white people, with little room for non-white, female voices (p. 63, p. 162). Speaking to an interdisciplinary readership, Alper calls on researchers to “keep voices attached to people” (p. 152), and on clinicians to attend to the individual and institutional class biases that inform their work with families (p. 159). And, she reminds us that as we work through the difficult business of “voice,” institutions and technology manufacturers remain unprepared to listen to non-speaking people. Overall, it is Alper’s aversion to unthinkingly praising technology and her ability to highlight the mundane that ring most critical in this text. This book helps us get past ideas of technology as a “metaphoric key for freeing a caged voice” (p. 2) and demonstrates how researching media and technology use in intersectional ways supports coalition building among people for whom “voice” remains a contentious topic (p. 32).