Live Blogging from @pat_ramsey ’s talk on “Accessibility and Social Media”.
SMS is primary social tool in Sub Sahara Africa – only data the infrastructure will support.
Problems: When there’s no way to skip repetitive content, no text equivilents for images when the sites are super image heavy, when you can’t identify inputs and controls – the rush makes accessibility fall by the wayside!
Problems arise when users who don’t know about accessibility can create content without the tools available for accessibility information. 15 year olds on YouTube don’t know about captions on their home movies – how to handle the user-generated content question?
How to make Web content accessible to peopele with disabilities. Education is key!
Text alternatives are important to image heavy sites: Thumbnails in discussion threads, avatars in forums, images in user galleries.
CAPTCHA: The questionable best way to handle bots. Turing Test Alternatives are better “Is fire hot or cold?”. What about audio files? They are, by definition, hard to hear! Look at Blogger’s audio CAPTCHA.
Don’t make it harder for your users to sign up than it is for bots and phishers! This should make you think long and hard about access barriers.
LABEL YOUR FORMS! The
Facebook Mobile: m.facebook.com, simpler, easier and faster loading. Much easier for screen reader use. beware – login and other forms still not labeled!
Twitter: “what are you doing?” is labeled correctly, most images have alt text. Skip nav is enabled. Use greasemonkey scripts to enhance accessibility. There is a third party accessible alternative.
WordPress: problems are two fold: admin interface and published interface. Templating on the front end works great for the 6 files (wrap your content in an accessible package). With admin panel – edits are lost on upgrade! Look at /wp-admin/ folder to see the admin template files. Login form in properly labeled for accessibility. Admin section has problems, but know issues are getting better. Alt+Z drops right to content editor! Those need to be told to users!
Developers know things can be better. WAI-ARIA used to send info back to blind twitterers about how many characters were left in their tweets (TPG Notifier).
“Great kid, now don’t get cocky” – There is a need to get content from developers about what does and doesn’t work. Open source can help with all this. Rather than feel overwhelmed, try to submit patches, find the accessibility hooks, share findings, communicate! WordPress IRC is always open, Facebook loves feedback!
