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?