The poster is a summary of my work about the accessibility of Social Networks made for the IT Dep. of University of Pavia

1. The accessibility of Social
Networks:
the Viadeo case
Chiara Evangelista,
Roberto Marmo, Marco Porta
Dip. di Informatica e Sistemistica
Università di Pavia
Via Ferrata, 1 – 27100 – Pavia – Italy
marmo@unipv.it; evangelista.chiara@alice.it;
marco.porta@unipv.it;
We propose a study about Social Network Accessibility which analyze in particular two of ones, Facebook
and LinkedIn, and verify the accessibility by comparison with the WCAG 2.0 of Viadeo, a Business Social
Network, second only to LinkedIn, and underline the aspects which are accessible and which are not.
Many people are affected by different type of disabilities and so
the navigation and the interaction with the computer results very
difficult.
In particular, a recent phenomenon, Social Media, risks to be
completely inaccessibile for this people because the technologies
are designed with aren’t accessibility-friend.
The result is that people with disability (for example, visually
impaired, blind, deaf, impairment people) can’t use and interface
with them so they are excluded from the world of Social Network.
Screen Reader is an important device for the blind
and people with low vision.
The screen reader is a technology that, through a
synthetic voice, reads everything that appears on the
PC screen.
The most popular and used is JAWS of Freedom
Scientific (Florida).
Now, we go to analyze the problem of navigation with
JAWS on Facebook and Linkedin.
Facebook and LinkedIn
Facebook results inaccessible for various reasons. At first, the appearance of the screen is different from that of the html
code read by JAWS (so the order of items is not so respected). In addition, the graphics (pictures and some links) are not
properly labeled. There isn’t also the possibility to upgrade to version high contrast and high readability.
Viadeo
Facebook Homepage
The study on Viadeo accessibility identifies some lacks:
1- Use of colors that create little contrast with the background and therefore are
not suitable for low-vision or color blind people
2- Presence of too much content with not enough space between text lines
3- It’s not possible to resize the text and change the color scheme
4- No presence of display “high contrast” or “content only” versions of the pages
5- It’s not possible to vary the structure or order of the content
6- It’s not possible to obtain clear indications about mistakes (no checking and
suggestions for correction)
LinkedIn is not accessibile for the presence of Iframe, frames
containing another Web Page, not be interpreted by screen readers.
LinkedIn Homepage
This study was conducted by analyzing the text of
the WCAG 2.0.
WCAG 2.0, “Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines”, are the new guidelines for
accessibility of Web content (official version of
2008).
They represent the revised edition of the existing
WCAG 1.0, written in 1999 for the same purpose.
They are document of W3C, The World Wide
Consortium, led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee
and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, which mission is “to lead the
Web to its full potential”.
W3C Logo
In this sense Viadeo presents
some changes: in particular, use
of colors that create more contrast
with the background and a better
distribution of content.