Social Media Accessibility

Disable users typically have significant problems accessing many web sites and web services. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act was enacted to eliminate barriers in information technology and make available new opportunities for the handicapped people and to encourage that web content providers as well as software developers can use to make the Web accessible to those who may or may not be using assistive technology.  To meet the requirements of Section 508 as well to promote their popularity, the major social media have been making efforts to remove their accessible barriers between their services and their disable consumers.  

Facebook has been working with the American foundation for the Blind to make things more accessible: “Facebook is working with the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) to make its social-networking service more accessible to users who are blind or visually impaired [...] Facebook is also working with AFB on design changes. Still, Augusto [head of the AFB] admits the ultimate goal — full accessibility for vision impaired users — is “far from being attained” (Augusto, 2009).  The assistive features includes audio CAPCHA, full HTML version of the site to make it easier for screen readers to decipher, Facebook chat accessible by screen readers, addition of a “no javascript” version of Facebook Gift Shop, shortcut keys to major areas of the site (Leggatt, 2009). 

Accessible Twitter offers a complete alternate interface to Twitter website. This application is now still in Beta stage, is designed to be easier to use and is optimized for disabled users. According to (Bryant, 2009), “Features of Accessible Twitter include all the functionality – the Tweet roll, your status, mentions & messages, plus access to search, trending topics and popular links. In addition, Accessible Twitter is: fully keyboard accessible; marked up semantically with headings optimized for screen reader users, and; fully functional with javascript disables.”

YouTube offers captioning for increasing accessibility to those who are with hearing impairment. While uploading a video to YouTube, you have the option , Easy YouTube caption creator, to upload a closed caption file for the video and you can even include multiple languages my adding multiple files. Youtube currently supports over 120 languages which should cover just about everyone on the planet. YouTube provides an alternate and fully accessible interface Youtube videos. The player can be installed on your own web server and completely re-skinned via CSS, providing an accessibly way for your customers to view YouTube videos (Dolson, 2010). 

In summary, most social media improve their accessibility mainly focused on people with visual disabilities with assistive technology include extended keyboard navigation and screen readers.  In fact, a disability may be physical, cognitive, mental, sensory, emotional, developmental or some combination of these. There are various needs that should be taken into considerations for people with different types of disabilities.

References:

Augusto, C. R. (2009, April 6). Making Facebook Accessible for Everyone. Retrieved May 2011, from Facebook: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=71852922130

Bryant, A. (2009, July 31). Accessible Twitter: how it should have been done to start with. Retrieved May 2011, from http://www.lessfussdesign.com/blog/2009/07/accessible-twitter/

Dolson, J. C. (2010, January 21). Accessibility and Social Media. Retrieved May 2011, from practical ecommerce: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1581-Accessibility-and-Social-Media

Leggatt, H. (2009, April 9). Facebook improver accessibility for visually disabled users. Retrieved May 2011, from BizReport: http://www.bizreport.com/2009/04/09/facebook_improves_accessibility_for_visually_disabled_users.html