Social Accessibility: A collaborative approach to improving Web accessibility

This chapter challenges the assumption that Web site owners are the ones who are responsible for the accessibility of Web content. Web designers and Web developers have been notorious for not following official accessibility guidelines. At the same time, the amount of user-generated Web content made it practically impossible for site owners to ensure content accessibility in a centralized fashion. However, the dawn of social computing promises that collaborative approach will overcome these problems. For this purpose, this discussion overviews the applications of social computing to Web accessibility and introduces Social Accessibility-a collaborative framework that brings together end users and volunteers for the purpose of creating external accessibility metadata. In making the Web accessible, the Social Accessibility approach bypasses content owners, considerably reducing the time for accessibility renovations. In addition, the centralized metadata can be used to educate Web designers and Web developers about creating accessible content while providing a central point for collaborative accessibility verification.