Accessibility in social media
Hello dear reader! Thank you for being here in one more entry. I greet you with love Ely Garcia, today I am not alone, because as I told you before, in this entry I will share the space with my dear friend Manuel Valdez who is the director and founder of the Latin American Observatory of Accessibility.
We have given ourselves the task of evaluating some of today's most important social networks. And you may be asking yourself, what's that for? Well, social networks are part of our world today and have a huge impact, at this point, it is almost impossible to imagine life without social networks, they have become part of our work, entertainment, communication, and even education.
This is why we want to highlight how it is framed in the international treaty on the rights of persons with disabilities that we also have the right to the full use of these media.
In the previous post, I talked about the standard that establishes the methodology and techniques to make the Internet an accessible space for people with disabilities who navigate it using any assistive technology, which is known as WCAG and belongs to the W3EE. Thanks to the WCAG, it is possible that there is an accessible web for people living with some kind of disability and that like everyone else, consult the web or your favorite social network. If you want to know more, we invite you to read our last blog post "The World of Web Accessibility", where we talk a little more in-depth about it.
Together with the Latin American Observatory of Accessibility, we conducted an automatic evaluation of the 5 most common social networks among Internet users measuring how accessible they are, here are the results:
Facebook 89%
Twitter 88%
Instagram 80%
WhatsApp 95%
LinkedIn 100%
These results and scores were obtained using the Google Lighthouse automatic evaluation tool. Taking as a sample the home feed with an open session, for each social network respectively.
It is important to note that the test result does not represent a complete accessibility evaluation.
Thanks to this quick test, we found that the most accessible social network is LinkedIn and the least accessible is Instagram.
We want to emphasize that a social network can be 100% accessible on its platform, but maintaining accessibility in content depends on users.
Imagine a social network without content, wouldn't it draw attention to itself a social network that does not have mechanisms for users to generate accessible content? It would not attract the attention of Internet users with disabilities who depend on accessibility to consume this content.
We would love for you to read our next post as we will tell you step-by-step how to create accessible content and contribute to inclusion from the web.
So, dear reader, we'll see you very soon.
With love:
Ely Garcia and Manuel Valdez