Social accessibility: Achieving accessibility through collaborative metadata authoring

Abstract

Web content is under the control of site owners, and therefore the site owners have the responsibility to make their content accessible. This is a basic assumption of Web accessibility. Users who want access to inaccessible content must ask the site owners for help. However, the process is slow and too often the need is mooted before the content becomes accessible. Social Accessibility is an approach to drastically reduce the burden on site owners and to shorten the time to provide accessible Web content by allowing volunteers worldwide to 'renovate' any webpage on the Internet. Users encountering Web access problems anywhere at any time will be able to immediately report the problems to a social computing service. Volunteers can be quickly notified, and they can easily respond by creating and publishing the requested accessibility metadata-also helping any other users who encounter the same problems. Site owners can learn about the methods for future accessibility renovations based on the volunteers' external metadata. There are two key technologies to enable this process, the external metadata that allows volunteers to annotate existing Web content, and the social computing service that supports the collaborative renovations. In this paper, we will first review previous approaches, and then propose the Social Accessibility approach. The scenario, implementation, and results of a pilot service are introduced, followed by discussion of future directions. Copyright 2008 ACM.