Accessibility of Social Networking Sites
I'm looking for resources on the accessibility of Social Media/Social Networking Sites (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube et al).
As a starter for ten, I've found AbilityNet's report from last year: Social networking sites lock our disabled users. A key issues there was inaccessible CAPTCHA. There's also Nomensa's article on Social Media and Accessibility.
One major threat to the accessibility of these sites is the fact that they rely on user generated content. But to what extent can sites mitigate against this (conformance to ATAG, for example)?
And is there any research on the accessibility of specific platforms?
Any thoughts/info appreciated!
James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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Further to this, I see Twitter has recently tackled its inaccessible CAPTCHA which is great to see.James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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I'm not a resource I'm afraid, but I'm doing just this at the moment so I can offer a little experience. There's a few really big pitfalls to accessibility in user-generated content.
The first is the type of media; text generally shouldn't be too difficult to deal with, you can scrape/analyse/rejig the content yourself to a certain extent to try and gain some context. With images, much less is possible. You won't get alt text or a description unless someone specifically provides it for you, clarity and scalability is pot luck. Videos are worse again, as one of the articles mentions it relies on proprietary software so there's nothing you can do at all. It'll work or not, it'll have captioning or not. If it's user-created then you can be certain it won't.
The second and mostly separate point is that it requires extra work by the user and that is a bigger problem still. If you have a picture sharing site and people are uploading their own pictures, all you can do is ask people to give their images a descriptive title and a further descriptive summary. It simply isn't going to happen and I can't imagine that it ever will. If you give them the option, they'll ignore it. If you make it mandatory, they'll leave. You could hope for some image analysis software to perhaps give a best guess at what the image contains, but that will be restricted to all but the very biggest, if that. I can imagine someone like Google giving it a shot. I know they've done work on automatically transcribing voice tracks.
The third and mostly separate point is that your accessibility relies on the accessibility of the original source. For instance, something I did for Newsgrail is add mobile alternatives for submitted links. It scans the submitted page for a mobile-specific or printable version then if the user is on a mobile they get the link to that page instead to save bandwidth and improve usability. Now I come to think about it, that may also be an appropriate action to take for accessibility, since so many websites are poor in that respect. The mobile alternative feature proved to be troublesome because many websites are also poor in many other areas too. URLs that are labelled as mobile alternatives are not really (links to a mobile homepage, for instance) or are links embedded and opened using javascript, or are not marked in any standard way at all. Thus despite my best intentions, the feature is crippled by the source.
The more general aspects of accessibility are almost entirely separate and addressable issues. In fact the more I think about the first link you posted, the more I dislike it. Virtually all the issues highlighted (CAPTCHAS, navigation skips, etc) are not problems associated with social networking at all and it says nothing about the problems I listed which are an unavoidable aspect of the genre.
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Thanks Newsgrail, some really interesting insights. You're absolutely right in saying that there are several separate issues - some easily avoided (as with CAPTCHA), others far more inherent and problematic.James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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I've posted an overview of Social Media Accessibility on my blog. Comments welcome.James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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