I don't know American Sign Language, but because of internet chatlines, I can communicate in real time with a deaf person without the aid of an interpreter. Because of closed-captioning, I can practice reading and speaking a second language. It also reveals that, at the core of a TV production, there almost always exists a written text, which steadfastly, though invisibly, reigns over the spectacle. Although they're perhaps most discounted by the increasing dominance of image over voice and text, visually impaired people also benefit from the electronic revolution. The latter has been crucial, in that it allows the internet to be even partially accessible to visually impaired users, but the web, in all its graphic glory, holds little of interest for blind users unless sites are specifically designed to take them into account as part of their audience.
Most web browsers allow for a user to 'turn off' the images.
But, still, these images serve a purpose and one of the biggest challenges for mediamakers is in deciding how to translate the detritus the iconic age, or more specifically, to decide what a jpeg and pict file on a website does to a viewer and how one might use text to do the same thing to someone who can't see. To the graphically literate, its looks pretty plain, but I think we're coming into a period of the iconic age in which plain text can be seen as having its own graphic effect. I noticed that even Wired Magazine bears less evidence of the 'wired aesthetic' these days, perhaps persuaded by the fact that most of its readers were skipping over the printed issue of the magazine in favor of the on-line version which was always served up 'sans' graphics. TV and mainstream cinema are of course the two industries with the most invested in presenting a graphic visual spectacle and may be the last to bear evidence of a text-based aesthetic, but a new assisitive technology called descriptive video service suggests a slight shift away from the spectacle towards text even in the movie theater in the form of an assisitive technology called Descriptive Video Service . A voice on the additional track provides a description of everything which is only communicated visually in the film.