Disability users’ evaluation of the web accessibility of SNS

Springer Science and Business Media LLC - Tập 8 - Trang 517-540 - 2013
Sang M. Lee1, Soon-Goo Hong2, Dong-Han An3, Hyun-Mi Lee2
1Management Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, USA
2Department of Management Information Systems, Dong-A University, Pusan, Korea
3Korea Web Accessibility Certification Center (KWACC), Seoul, Korea

Tóm tắt

Social network service (SNS) is an effective communication tool for the community of disabled people. However, there is a general paucity of research on web accessibility of SNSs. This study investigates web accessibility of four SNSs that are most popular among disabled people: Facebook, Twitter, Me2day, and Yozm. Eight disabled individuals were selected according to the type of disability: two with total blindness, two with low vision, two with brain lesions, and two with an upper extremity disability. The subjects were asked to perform four navigation-related tasks and ten general tasks for each SNS. The success rate of their performances and user satisfaction levels were then measured. The four SNSs, on average, attained a task success rate of 73 % and a user satisfaction score of 3.1 points (max. = 5), indicating that the disabled participants found the websites generally inconvenient. As a pioneering evaluative study of the web accessibility of major SNS sites for the disabled, this research contributes to both theory and practice.

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