Revisiting the Access Rainbow
Karen Louise Smith, Leslie Regan Shade, Andrew Clement · The Journal of Community Informatics · 2024
The Access Rainbow offers a 7-layer socio-technical model for universal access that has been widely discussed in CI. For the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Journal of Community Informatics (JOCI), we explore what this public interest model of universal access foreshadowed as critical issues about AI and emerging information infrastructures. Looking forward, we challenge CI scholars to continue to leverage the Access Rainbow model to foreground human rights issues, and to continue the empowerment-oriented work associated with CI activism in datafied and algorithmically intensive domains.