I'm traveling to the UK today to give a talk at a literacy conference so am doing a lot of thinking about literacy while moving about. Airports and airplanes are full of rich and intensely multimodal literacy practices. They are fairly exclusionary, however. An African family had difficulty knowing which train stop to get off at Dulles because they don't speak English or at least they couldn't understand the computerized voice that told them what stop we were coming to. Frankly, native English speakers have a hard time understanding that voice. They don't have a written display as a compliment either. Lots of reliance on oral modes that, if one is Deaf for example, you wouldn't be able to hear. Seems like having written displays would be more inclusive.
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