Knocking on Facebook’s Door
Social networking has taken the web world by storm in recent years. People can link up in all kinds of ways now and share their stories, thoughts and connections. This promises much for barriers between people to come down, be they physical barriers or otherwise.
Unfortunately, all is not rosy in this online garden of Eden.
AbilityNet, a leading UK charity helping disabled adults and children use information technology, published a State of the eNation Report in January 2008 on accessibility and social networking sites. It does not make good reading. It seems that some people with disabilities cannot even access these sites, let alone interact through them.
Kath Moonan, Senior Accessibility and Usability Consultant at AbilityNet, carried out the research and gave me her thoughts on the findings. The websites reviewed were MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, and Bebo.
Moonan highlights how the marginalization of disabled people is only added to if social networking sites continue to be inaccessible to them. Rather than building bridges, this is Web 2.0 actually intensifying people’s feelings of isolation and difference.
Disaboom’s Kim Dority and Ouch!’s Gideon Goldberg are also keenly aware of this. “I do believe that advances in web capability have the potential to have an even greater impact on bridging this isolation,” Dority says “but only if those advances are developed with accessibility issues in mind.” Goldberg, meanwhile, believes that “in reality, many of these ‘Web 2.0’ sites are a step back in terms of accessibility.”
So, where does this leave us? If the most popular networking sites fail to listen to “the wisdom of the disabled crowd”, as Moonan puts it, what hope is there that Web 2.0 can really have a positive effect on disabled people’s place in society?
Fortunately, some help is at hand.
Part 6: Every crowd has a silver lining