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:

• AJAX and Screen­read­ers: When Can it Work? by James Edwards,
• AJAX Acces­si­bil­ity Overview from Becky Gibson,
• AJAX and Acces­si­bil­ity from Peter Krantz,
• Is AJAX Acces­si­bil­ity a major issue? by Chris Cor­nutt (also note some of the other posts in their acces­si­bil­ity cat­e­gory),
• Web 2.0: A step back­wards for acces­si­bil­ity? by Cath Everett, and
• Devel­op­ers Work­ing to Over­come AJAX Acces­si­bil­ity Issues by Dar­ryl K. Taft.

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:

• Acces­si­bil­ity of AJAX Appli­ca­tions from WebAIM,
• Web 2.0 & Acces­si­bil­ity for Dis­abled Users by Kath Moonan,
• Acces­si­ble Web 2.0 Appli­ca­tions with WAI‑ARIA by Mar­tin Kliehm, and
• a great list of other resources from Max Kiesler (via find­abil­ity).

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?