by Allan Friedman, CFILC's Technologies Manager
First, the good news; the AT Blog is on one of the most
accessible social media platforms (Blogspot).
Now for the bad news; that's not saying much.
A recent study conducted by The Australian Communications
Consumer Action Network and Media Access Australia found that despite the
rapidly growing popularity and use of social media by people with disabilities, the most popular
social media websites remain largely inaccessible.
The report, Sociability:
Social Media for People with Disabilities details research
conducted in 2011 by Denis Boudreau of Accessibilité Web. It compared five social
media tools against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) and created a customized percentage
score of accessibility. Of the five
tools; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the recently launched Google+; LinkedIn received the highest score of 29% accessible followed by YouTube on
18%, Google+ on 9%, Facebook on 9% and Twitter receiving no accessibility score
due to every element on the website having accessibility issues.1
The report details the accessibility issues of each
social media website. While the
accessibility of most is improving in response to user complaints, many still
do not provide equal access for people with disabilities. It continues to be a game of catch-up and hurdling
barriers with workarounds and alternative sites.
On blogging, the report noted "Popular blogging tools
such as Blogger which is used by Google’s BlogSpot, and Wordpress.com have
default interfaces which are reasonably accessible."
But YouTube was singled out for its largely inaccessible
video player interface. It noted recent
improvements such as automated captions (not too accurate in my experience)
self-captioning tools, and alternative portals to clips such as Accessible
Youtube and Easy Youtube.
Twitter, a mostly text-based application, is almost
completely inaccessible to screen readers, according to the researchers. A number of workarounds and alternative sites
are included in the report.
Even the most accessible site, Linkedin, requires some
alternatives to get the best results. People
with vision impairments found it difficult to search for people and to determine the correct one when they used the site's own search tool. Users reported better results using Google to
find individuals and navigating from there to the person's Linkedin page.
This Australian report, published in February 2012, is the
most up-to-date study of the constantly evolving world of social media. Many of
its findings and suggestions may well be out-of-date already. But it illustrates a persistent problem with
the way the Internet has evolved. Why is access for people with disabilities
almost always a revision or adaptation of web applications? Why, when standards and guidelines for
accessibility are well established and readily available, are designers and
engineers continuing to build inaccessible sites? I'll address that issue in part two of this
series; Chasing the Digital Divide.
What is your experience with the accessibility of social media sites? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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