When trying to figure out what sort of topic I wanted to cover in my blog post, I found myself surfing the internet. This web surfing “distraction” led to me think about web accessibility for the disabled. I assumed the role of a partially blind person and thought, well how accessible are these websites I’m looking at to someone with poor vision?
Given that I was on Facebook and a few other popular websites, I figured they would have covered this somewhere in their sites, since they received so much traffic everyday. Turns out, Facebook has been hard at work in attempts to make some of their sites “more accessible.” Their solution seems to be a glorified “different” version of the Facebook pages we all know and creates a different experience to the user if they have a disability.
Although, these are steps in the right direction for Facebook, but this sort of singling out creates the issue of “separate but equal” mentality. Why should your disability prevent you from having the same user experience as everyone else? With the 40 million plus people in the world that have disabilities, it would behoove web developers to analyze their potential audiences and put web accessibility on a higher pedestal. Although, it is easy to pick on this site since they receive so much traffic and publicity, they are giants among millions of other websites. I would think that they would want to set a standard that others could follow in making their social community 100% accessibly to all communities of people even the disabled.
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