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?

The Other Web Accessibility 2.0

There is plenty of discussion happening on the upcoming version 2.0 of the WCAG. Fortunately, there has also been some good discussion regarding impact of the Web 2.0-volution on accessibility. The rush to ajaxify user interactions and the opening of the floodgates of user contributed floodgates has not necessarily been a good thing for accessibility.

Bruce Lawson noted his concerns back in 2005:

I also worry about accessibility. It strikes me that people are so busy adding extra Ajax loveliness that the separatestripped-down “html-only” versions they offer are unthinkingly accepted as a legitimate sop to people with disabilities. We reject separate “text-only sites” in Web 1.0 ; why should we accept them in “Web 2.0″?

Roger Johansson echoes those sentiments (with some good commentary from his readers):

There is some truth to Bruce’s observations, and it would be a sad step backwards if the perceived coolness of “Web 2.0” brings back the old days of non-graceful degradation.

Ian Lloyd comments with a post titled, AJAX, Accessibility & Screen Readers:

There’s something of an oxymoron going on there in the heading. Can you spot it? The words ‘accessibility’ and ‘AJAX’. They really are not the best of bed fellows, as many people have discovered.

Joe Clark provided notes from a presentation titled Build Half a Product: Is Ajax accessible? At all?, including the results of some usability tests on popular Web 2.0 application Basecamp.

There’s more where all of that came from:

Everyone seems to agree that there is a problem. Fortunately there are also some great resources to set you in the right direction if you are working to create an accessible Web 2.0 application:

In this outdated comment on Bruce Lawson’s above post, someone from Wild Apricot states:

Unfortunately, we could not afford to make the system backend support all the accessibility standards because it would mean two or three times more coding (not 10% or 25% – and I am NOT exaggerating). Creating interactive AND usable interfaces is very hard – and I do not know if many developers can manage to do it on their own. Development frameworks and browsers have to help too.

What is your experience in developing accessible Web 2.0 sites or applications? What AJAX/Javascript frameworks do you use that encourage accessible best practices? What are some good examples of accessible Web 2.0 experiences?