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This study explores the motivation for usage, benefits, and strategies to overcoming the challenges visually impaired people face in their Facebook interactions. Using in-depth interviews and a narrative analysis of five visually impaired students at the University of Cape Coast, we found that Facebook usage among visually impaired students, although unique in experiences and gratifications, has promoted the formation and strengthening of their social bonds in the community of visually impaired people and their significant other. However, the visually impaired students face significant challenges with interpreting the pictures and videos they encounter on Facebook because screen reader software currently in use cannot interpret graphical content forcing them to rely on their sighted friends which have created independence and privacy issues. Despite these challenges, Facebook remains a powerful communication tool for visually impaired students in interacting with both their disabled and non-disabled friends whom they would normally shy away from in person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature has emerged that is contesting the validity of Africa's negative Western media representation as a myth and empirically non-existent. This article examines how four national newspapers in Ghana reported the continent. About 13,228 corpus belonging to these top four national newspapers, over a period of 2 years, were quantitatively examined for sources utilised. Based on a 2-week constructed sampling technique, 180 articles reporting Africa were further analysed for the subjects and tone of the coverage, and the dominant themes of representation. The ethnographic content analysis revealed that the coverage of the continent in these newspapers is dominated by themes of war, crime, killings, crises, terrorism and omission of progress. The African story was mostly narrated through the subject of politics and with a predominantly negative tone. I argue that the continent's negative proxy self-coverage confirms the evasive spread of Afro-pessimism considering that Western global news organisations accounted for over 80 per cent of the reportage as sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated, from multiple levels and perspectives, the influences exerted by global news organisations on the representation of Africa in the Ghanaian press detailing the conditions that have accounted for these influences, which remain celebrated as universal news values. Relying on content analysis, survey and ethnographic interview, the study uncovered a postcolonial ambivalence in which Ghanaian journalists rather largely sought to rationalise these multiple ideological influences on their news-selection with little resistance. The self-reflexive appropriation of an African perspective by these journalists was not reflected in their coverage of the continent. Their heavy reliance on global news organisations, especially the BBC, depicts a lingering postcolonial influence. Although they constructed their increasing use of Xinhua news agency as a form of resistance, the invasion of their subconscious mind by qualities of the BBC is rather submissive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]