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?

Where to Discuss Accessibility– Forums, Mailing Lists and Blogs

Let’s say that you have a burn­ing acces­si­bil­ity ques­tion that you are dying to ask some­one and your roommate/spouse/pet are no help at all– where do you go? Here are a few good places to start:

• Acces­sify Forums from the good folks at Acces­sify. The forum has been around since August of 2003 and has over 6000 mem­bers and more than 50,000 posts. If your ques­tion hasn’t already been asked and answered, chances are there is some­one hang­ing out over there who can answer it. The top­ics range from begin­ner to expert and runs on a mod­i­fied ver­sion of phpBB.
• Web Acces­si­bil­ity E-mail Dis­cus­sion List from WebAIM. The list archives show that the first posts showed up in Novem­ber of 2003 and there have been hun­dreds of posts since then, with over 1400 posts that include “pdf” alone! If you are not a list­serv per­son, you can also use their WebAIM Acces­si­bil­ity Forums run­ning on PunBB.
  (Update 9/13 The WebAIM List started in 1999)
• The Guild of Acces­si­ble Web Devel­op­ers offers a few meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, but they are pri­mar­ily off-limits to any­one who is not a mem­ber. GAWDS has an IRC chan­nel #gawds on irc.freenode.net as well as a forum and mail­ing list that are both for mem­bers only. I am not a mem­ber, so I don’t know how much any of these are used– any­one have more infor­ma­tion on any of these resources?
• The UACCESS-L list­serv from the Trace Cen­ter is per­haps more gen­eral as a “dis­cus­sion of uni­ver­sal access to infor­ma­tion sys­tems” list with posts in the archive going back to Decem­ber of 1998. They also have a sep­a­rate Sec­tion 508 list­serv.
• The Web Acces­si­bil­ity Ini­tia­tive Inter­est Group (WAI IG) mail­ing list may not be for every­one, but the archives there go back to April of 1997 with thou­sands of posts. The WAI also has a num­ber of other groups, includ­ing the WCAG Work­ing Group.

If none of those suit your fancy, there are a few other options. Some of the largest web devel­oper com­mu­ni­ties have forums specif­i­cally for acces­si­bil­ity issues, such as the acces­si­bil­ity and usabil­ity forum at the Web­mas­ter World and the acces­si­bil­ity forum at Webdeveloper.com. Even if there isn’t a spe­cific forum at your favorite web devel­op­ment form, peo­ple are likely still talk­ing about acces­si­bil­ity (from Dev Shed).

Also, while you may not be able to ini­ti­ate the dis­cus­sion, there are always lots of great dis­cus­sions hap­pen­ing at your favorite acces­si­bil­ity blog (thanks Jared) or web mag­a­zine.

If you are look­ing for a more spe­cific cat­e­gory of acces­si­bil­ity, it may be out there some­where as well. For exam­ples, check out the fairly active Yahoo! Group on Cap­tion­ing or the Java Access list­serv from Sun Microsys­tems. Sim­i­larly, there are a num­ber dis­cus­sion lists and forums that are spe­cific to a dis­abil­ity pop­u­la­tion, such as the Com­puter Use by and for the Blind list

Lastly, don’t miss out on any local groups. There are a num­ber of uni­ver­sity and gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tions that pro­vide venues to dis­cuss acces­si­bil­ity issues with peo­ple in your own back­yard– any­one from the Phillip­ines?

Where do you go to ask that burn­ing acces­si­bil­ity question?