Social Networking Accessibility

Via Accesssites.org, a sum­mary of a 21 page report on the acces­si­bil­ity of social net­works from Abil­i­tyNet. The report ana­lyzes Face­book, MySpace, YouTube, Yahoo and Bebo and reports that they all stink. Of those 5 sites, Yahoo was the only was to receive a two-star rat­ing– that’s two starts out of five. The other four all received one star indi­cat­ing they are ‘very inaccessible’.

The Dataportability.org group has been in the news of late as a num­ber of major social net­works have become involved. While their stated mis­sion is not to make social net­works acces­si­ble for users with dis­abil­i­ties, the goal that they are work­ing towards should have that over­all effect over time. They are work­ing to pro­mote the use of exist­ing open stan­dards to facil­i­tate the shar­ing of social net­work user con­tent out­side of that net­work. Over time this will open the door to the cre­ation of more acces­si­ble inter­faces to access at least some of the data that is cur­rently avail­able only through pro­pri­etary, inac­ces­si­ble systems.

Hope­fully, the process of mak­ing user con­tent more read­ily avail­able will also lead to improve­ments in acces­si­bil­ity along the way. In the mean­time, are users with dis­abil­i­ties being left out of the social net­work­ing rev­o­lu­tion? Is any­one doing this right?

Accessible Web Browsers

I have men­tioned a symbol-based browser before, but here is a list of three dif­fer­ent acces­si­ble browsers:

Free Acces­si­ble Web Browsers for Learn­ers with Mul­ti­ple Disabilities

Accessible Pen and Paper?

I first heard of Live­scribe from an announce­ment of their upcom­ing ‘smart­pen’ and noted that a for­mer pro­fes­sor, Andy Van Schaack, PhD was involved in the project. A few weeks ago, I was able to attend a pre­sen­ta­tion from Dr. Van Schaack and learned a lit­tle more about the project. I was espe­cially inter­ested in the note on the pre­sen­ta­tion flyer that said he would “present his cur­rent NSF–funded study on the use of the smart­pen to sup­port blind col­lege stu­dents in sci­ence, engi­neer­ing and math.”

He started off with pro­mo­tional infor­ma­tion about how the Live­scribe sys­tem is a new com­put­ing plat­form with a great team behind it. By all accounts it appears to be a laud­able effort in the arena of com­pa­ra­ble smart pen tech­nolo­gies. It works by record­ing audio while using the pen on spe­cial paper. You can then go back to any point in your notes, tap on the page and lis­ten to the cor­re­spond­ing audio. Your notes also become search­able and shareable.

Then he addressed how the project would help make con­tent acces­si­ble for stu­dents who are blind. Cur­rently, a stu­dent who is blind study­ing in a field that requires the use of graphs or dia­grams would need a tech­nol­ogy toolkit such as a lap­top paired with a not inex­pen­sive tac­tile talk­ing tablet. The price point low­ers sig­nif­i­cantly as stu­dents are able to use the Live­scribe pen with the more afford­able Sewell raised-line draw­ing kit. This com­bi­na­tion of tech­nol­ogy allows the stu­dents to draw and anno­tate a graph with the abil­ity to ref­er­ence the graphic later and access what­ever audio was recorded at the time.

Addi­tional Resources

• Live­scribe site
• Smart­pen aids blind engi­neer­ing students
• New Smart­pen and Paper to Help Teach Blind Col­lege Students
• NSF Grant Infor­ma­tion– Award Abstract #0726403 and Award Abstract #0726424
• Live­Scribe Smart­pen Demo With Walt Moss­berg and Kara Swisher
• Addi­tional Tac­tile Graph­ics Resources
• NCDAE Web­cast on Elec­tronic Acces­si­bil­ity in Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, Engi­neer­ing, and Mathematics

(Update) Andy sent me a cou­ple of addi­tional links to share:

• Arti­cle on the smart­pen from Vanderbilt’s Online Research Magazine
• Van­der­bilt Press Release