Unfortunately, what all these have in common, is a great number of problems when it comes to accessibility. This is not just for the blind and visually impaired, but also considering people with other kinds of disabilities. The less good the markup in general, the less assistive technologies of any kind will work, and the less likely people with varying disabilities will be able to use them successfully to interact with others. Remember, all of these call themselves “social networks”. But if you try to apply the term for people with disabilities, the concept often falls over quite badly. Let’s have a look!

Twitter

Twitter relaunched its web offering a few months ago, calling it “New Twitter”, and frankly, pissing off a lot of folks with it, disabled or otherwise. Many of the items are not properly marked up or keyboard accessible. Put your mouse away and try to reach all the options. I guarantee yo you will encounter problems. Some of the stuff is only reachable by hovering the mouse over an item. Others are marked up in a way that is totally inaccessible. For example, with New Twitter, I can no longer block or report an offending account for spam. All I can do is follow. Mouse users have some sort of funky button at the top right somewhere they can do these things, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get to it via any accessibility means at my disposal.

There are other problems, for example I often hear people complaining that they miss out on direct messages sent to them because the Twitter site doesn’t properly notify them. This is not an accessibility so much as a usability issue that affects everybody.

Compared to the old site, it’s a huge step backwards in accessibility. Tweets are also no longer put into a list, so jumping from tweet to tweet using the “jump to next list item” feature most screen readers offer, no longer works, making reading tweet timelines via Twitter really really cumbersome.

Clients

Fortunately, there are a lot of accessible clients out there that allow access to Twitter. The Twitter app for iOS is coming to be accessible more and more. The iPhone version is almost completely accessible, the iPad version still leaves a lot to be desired, but has come a long way since its initial release, which offered no VoiceOver output whatsoever. If Twitter stick to this path, they’ll eventually manage to make it fully accessible there, too. [Update Dec 9, 2011: Actually, version 4 of the iOS twitter app came out a few hours after I posted this article, and it turns out it is not only a big step back in usability for the more advanced user, but also a big step backwards in accessibility on the iPhone. The iPad UI, not yet changed to the new usability concept, has become more accessible, but is still not useable efficiently.] I am not an Android user, so I am not certain how well the Android version of Twitter fares with Talkback or other Android accessibility aids. [Update December 9, 2011: From what I gather from various sources, the newest version, published a few hours after I posted this article, has been rendered completely unusable for Talkback users.]

There’s also a web client called Easy Chirp (formerly Accessible Twitter) by Mr. Web Axe Dennis Lembree. This one is marvelous, it offers all the features one would expect from a Twitter client, in your browser, and it’s all accessible to people with varying disabilities! It uses all the good modern web standard stuff like WAI-ARIA to make sure even advanced interaction is done accessibly. I even know many non-disabled people using it for its straight forward interface and simplicity.

For iOS, there are two more Apps I usually recommend to people. For the iPhone, my favorite Twitter client is TweetList Pro, an advanced Twitter client that has full VoiceOver support, and they’re not even too shy to say it in their app description! They recently even added such things as muting users, hash tags or clients, making it THE Twitter client of choice for me for all intents and purposes.

Another one, which I use on the iPad for its native interface, is Twitterrific by The Icon Factory. Their iPhone and iPad app is fully accessible, the Mac version, on the other hand, is totally inaccessible. On the Mac, I use the client Yorufukurou (night owl).

A similar picture can be painted for Echofon. The Firefox extension and desktop clients are largely inaccessible, the iOS version is.

Oh yes and if you’re blind and on Windows, there’s only one client available for you, which is becoming the successor to Qwitter, Twitmonger. It’s designed specifically for the blind with hardly any visual UI, and it requires a screen reader or at least installed speech synthesizer to talk.

In short, for Twitter, there is a range of clients, one of which, the EasyChirp web application, is truly cross-platform and useable anywhere, others are for specific platforms. But you have accessible means to get to Twitter services without having to use their web site.

Facebook

Facebook recently rolled out a big design update, with something called a FB timeline and other visual goodies or baddies, depending on who you talk to. And while the previous version took step by step to become quite accessible, this new design takes it all away again. It pops open stuff in locations somewhere in the middle of the HTML code (and therefore the middle of the virtual documents screen readers create), without setting keyboard focus there and allowing straight interaction. The timeline that can update by the second is a beast to try and keep track of things. Missing heading structure makes it hard to find things or organize one’s usage patterns. As it stands now, I cannot even answer friend requests using the standard interface. I have to resort to the mobile version to do this. This version is, however, so stripped down in functionality that it is very cumbersome. And the mobile stuff behaves as if folks at FB think mobile phones have never heard of JavaScript before. Everything you do triggers a full page load and therefore is slow as hell.

For the rare occasions I use that social network, the stuff I have to do like answering friend requests has become even more cumbersome, because depending on what I need to do, I have to switch between the standard and mobile interfaces now. Even more annoying than before!

Clients

Well, I know of only one client, really, the iOS one also published by Facebook. I know there’s an Android client, too, but have not used it. The iOS app has problems on and off with accessibility on the iPhone. On the newly released iPad UI, there are even more problems. You cannot post a status update if you have to use VoiceOver, from the iPad, for example.

Facebook Messenger has even more accessibility problems, lots of unlabelled buttons, and the messages themselves aren’t read, only the names and time stamps.

For chat, I am using Adium with the Jabber interface to Facebook chat.

Google Plus

Google Plus was THE most hyped thing of the summer hole, and as fast as summer went, so did people lose interest in it. And you know what? That’s well deserved! The Google Accessibility team said at launch that “accessibility was considered up-front” in Google Plus. Guess what? Consideration was mostly what there was to it, hardly any deeds had been following those considerations. Adding people to circles, posting a status update and choosing the circles to post to… It was cumbersome, it was in large parts unuseable with the keyboard, much less a screen reader. I became so frustrated with it that I deleted my account after 3 weeks, and I won’t be coming back. If you are interested in a more thorough review, find Kevin Chao’s posts in the “Accessible” Google Group where he talks about the problems of Google Plus and their iOS app, which also fails accessibility.

Yammer

Yammer is an enterprise social network we at Mozilla and in a lot of other companies use for much internal communication. It also has some serious accessibility issues, but also has a responsive Twitter account where I quickly came in contact with a person to talk to about the problems I’m having. Right now, for example, I cannot post status updates myself since that widget isn’t keyboard accessible.

iOS client

The iOS client for this web app also has problems. There, I can post, but I cannot read any other’s posts. The VoiceOver support doesn’t include the actual text of a post in any of the views. But again, the team who produces the iOS app also belongs to Yammer, Inc., so hopefully we’ll be able to resolve these soon!

identi.ca

identi.ca from Status.net is a microblogging service similar to Twitter. And unlike Twitter, it’s accessible out of the box! This is good since it does not have a wealth of clients supporting it like Twitter does, so with its own interface being accessible right away, this is a big help! It is, btw, the only open-source social network in these tests. Mean anything? Probably!

Conclusion

Out of all the social networks I tested, only the last one, the open-source identi.ca service is accessible up-front. All the others have issues right away, or introduced severe issues upon relaunch/UI update.

In looking for reasons why this is, there are two that come to mind immediately. For one, lack of knowledge or gaps in the test coverage. If all testers or developers of web applications would put the mouse away or disable their track pads for just five minutes and test their own stuff with just the keyboard, they’d be surprised at how many issues, most of them super simple to fix, they’d find! This knowledge can be refreshed. There is a wealth of information out there on accessible web design. And there’s a community that is willing to help if pinged!

Another reason is the common misconception of many managers or other business decision makers that accessible web design is far more expensive than just leaving it out. You’re only right on that count if you continue to consider accessibility as an after-thought only, having to build it on top when asked, complained, getting bad press or even getting sued. If you decide to allow your developers to put in accessibility up-front, making inclusive design decisions, you’ll still find that it requires a bit more testing, but won’t require nearly as many resources as it would to build in accessibility after the fact.

Another suggestion: Look at what others are doing! Learn from them! Don’t be shy to ask questions! If you look at what Yahoo! have been doing for the last three years, building inclusive design patterns into all of their web apps including the latest Yahoo! Mail update, you’re seeing an example of that it can be done, rich in functionality and visual esthetics, but still fully accessible!

I know that it isn’t quite New Year’s Eve yet, but my hope for 2012 would be that more social network makers would take the word “social” in their business slogans more seriously and start thinking inclusively rather than excludingly!

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Tim Berners-Lee for writing the initial proposal and sticking to the idea even though his boss, Mike Sendall forgot about it after calling it “vague, but exciting…”.

For me, the web has opened a ton of possibilities that I would have otherwise required sighted assistance with, or which would not be possible for me to do at all, such as casually browsing the New York Times or the Hamburger Abendblatt. I would not be able to look for specific items on, or simply browse the offerings of Amazon. I would not be able to sell no longer needed items on eBay.

Without the web, the world of newspapers would always be more or less hidden from me, unless a sighted person read something to me. The truth is, even though there is very good optical character recognition software out there, newspaper layouts are simply too much to cope, let alone that most newspaper formats don’t fit on off-the-shelf scanners, or even those scanners produced by assistive technology firms.

For shopping, I would always have to rely on someone else to share what they thought the most interesting or compelling offerings in a shopping mall were. It would not be solely my decision what CD I’d buy, what electronic gadget was best for me etc. Oh yes, in many cases I would probably get what I wanted, but it would never be my 100% freedom of choice without depending on others to help me.

And to sell my no longer needed items, I would have to request the assistance of a magazine agent or enlist a sighted friend’s help with preparing an ad, getting it sent in to a magazine publisher, etc.

And these are just some of the things the web has allowed me as a blind person to do independently that were not possible before.

Also, other persons with disabilities benefit hugely from the web, like hearing-impaired who can communicate with anyone without the barrier of most others not speaking sign language. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that the web has revolutionized the way persons with disabilities can participate in society.

And that brings me to a point David Baron raised. I can only echo what Wendy Chisholm said in response. I consider access to information just like anyone else to be a right I have as a human being, and the web is the only independent means of doing so. If anyone would try to take that away from me, I promise that I’d prosecute them to the full lawful extent possible.

However, let me emphasize this: I utterly disagree with John Foliot who said that Bespin should never have been released because it uses the Canvas element which is not accessible currently. Here are my reasons for that:

Bespin is not a released product, it’s a Mozilla Labs project that is in a highly experimental stage. Being as open as Mozilla, who share everything we do with the public, some might easily get misled and think that this is a released product already. I can only suggest: Read carefully, then you won’t fall into that trap.

Bespin shows us that the Canvas element can be used for more than just rendering some nice and shiny graphics. It shows that there are still deficiencies in the HTML 5 Canvas element design which need to be rectified as soon as possible. And this is what experiments are for, and always have been: Experiments are there to learn from and improve upon.

The history of the web and the development with the Canvas element we’re seeing now aren’t all that dissimilar in fact. Berners-Lee’s experimental and first theoretical proposal only later turned into something that could actually be useful, when he received his NeXt workstation where he could finally start programming the first web server. He could not have known what would once become the web as we know it today. The inception of the Canvas element probably also happened without realization that someone might actually build a code editor upon it.

In that sense, I am very very thankful for the Bespin team to share their work as early as they did. You guys have shown the web community that there is still work to be done to make Canvas content accessible to screen readers. So rather than whining about Bespin not being accessible, and pushing the developers into the defensive by reflexively yelling before thinking things through, we should get our act together and find out a way to make it accessible soonish! Bespin is a chance, not an evil deliberate move to exclude people with disabilities.

In that spirit, a wholehearted HAPPY BIRTHDAY WORLD WIDE WEB!

The rules

1. Link back to your original tagger and list the rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 people by leaving name and link to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The seven things

1. I was born in a small town called Dannenberg. My mother is native to the town, and my father, after having been a prisoner of war when he was still a young boy, moved from Poland to West Germany, and finally to Dannenberg when he married my mom. I went to Kindergarten there. I was born blind, and because Dannenberg in the late 70s didn’t have the facilities to give a blind child proper schooling, I went to school in Hamburg. I visited my parents over the weekends and during the school holidays, but as I grew older, the visits on weekends became more rare. When I was repeating 12th grade, I moved into my own apartment and made Hamburg my permanent residence. St. Georg, which is the name of the part of Hamburg I lived in is renowned for being both a heavily gay populated area as well as a center for drug addict problems. Having lived there for 13 years is probably the greatest time of my life before moving in with my wife, and that’s not because of the drugs! When I married my wife, we moved to an outer part of Hamburg called Kirchwerder.
2. I met my wife through her moving into the neighboring house and renting an apartment there. We were best buddies for almost nine years before we fell in love. From there to getting married, however, it took us only 4 months. And it was her who proposed, and I accepted on the spot!
3. In my later school years, I was the singer of a school band. We performed songs by Bryan Adams, Queen, Cyndie Lauper (I sang the male part of “Time after Time”), and I also did a decent show on the “Light My Fire” classic by The Doors. When I watch this VHS tape today, I shudder at my singing performance.. Let’s just say that my voice has grown a lot since then.
4. It’s probably hard to believe, but the man who most influenced my singing is Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. And yes, that includes the falsetto as well! So why did the above list of songs we performed not contain any Bee Gees tracks? Well ya know…That’s a story for another time. But I’m definitely not limited to Bee Gees songs, and I’m quick at learning lyrics. So if I’m in MV or Toronto, and you need a singer for Rock Star, feel free to come by and ask!
5. My first computer was not a C64, but a C128D, which had a C64 emulator. I had the later model with the metal casing and without the cooling fan. I did run all the cool C64 games just like my class mates did, and was especially proficient in the “Winter Games” and “World Games” sports games, which could be played by accoustics. I used to frustrate my father, who is not blind, by always beating him at the slay race in “Winter Games”. This computer did not have a screen reader. My father and I spent hours in front of this thing, him reading stuff to me when I was programming or trying out new software, or I did lots of other things purely by hearing the sounds in the TV speakers change depending on what was displayed, and memorizing very specific keyboard sequences. Along with the C128D, we bought a 7-pin Seikosha 180 printer that was so loud my mother could always hear us work from the back of the garden. I collected my first programming experiences there, using the more advanced BASIC 7.0 that came with the C128, and later also Turbo Pascal, which ran under the accompanying CP/M 3.0 mode. I stuck with Pascal for the next 20 years. I moved to Turbo Pascal 5.5 when I got my first PC in 1991, and in 1996, a month after I got my Windows screen reader, I programmed my first Windows UI piece of software in Borland Delphi (now CodeGear Delphi). I did this as a hobbyist until 2007. Only when I started working for Mozilla QA, and spending my free time away from the computer more, I discontinued doing that. Besides, it’s much more fun nowadays to write something in XUL and know it runs on more accessible platforms than just Windows.
6. I am frequently complimented on my decent English. I had an Irishman as an English teacher at school for three years, and we used to talk to him in English even out of class. I always worked with people from all over the world during my professional career, I have a nag for the language, and the rest is Star Trek. It’s strongly American influenced, which once led a cab driver in Birmingham in the UK to ask me where I have my “Yankee accent from”.
7. I do Judo for a hobby. i did this when I was a teenager, then dropped out for 20 years, and again started fresh after I came out of a recuperative stay at a clinic in May 2007. I’m striving for my yellow-orange belt this or next month, so wish me luck!

And now for the tagging! I nominate:

1. Jamie and Mick AKA the main developers of NVDA, a free and open-source screen reader for Windows
2. Willie Walker, project lead for the Orca screen reader for GNOME
3. Eitan Isaacson, a Mozilla Foundation grantee who has helped the open-source accessibility community in more ways than I can count, and hopefully will do so for quite some time to come!
4. Frank Hecker, who also helped the open-source accessibility movement in more ways than I can count.
5. Dirk Ginader, web developer at Yahoo! with a strong emphasis on, and understanding for, accessibility
6. Christiane Link – who recently moved to London and started a successful newspaper project there
7. Stefan Nitzsche – because he’s fun to be around, and because he’s the tallest guy in accessible web design I know.

I therefore browsed around a bit on the WordPress plugins site and tried out a few Social Bookmarking plugins on my local test install.

I found that Social Bookmarking reloaded both offers a wide range of Social Bookmarking services and is also accessible.

However, it displays a button for each service, and this can easily clutter up the page. Also, some feedback both here on the blog as well as through other means, it was indicated that the right service is hard to find, even for sighted mouse users. In addition, whatever service I deactivate, I’ll never get just the ones everyone needs.

So after a day, I’ve now decided to not go with “Social Bookmarking Reloaded”, but instead try out AddThis. Their WordPress plugin is unintrusive, only adds a single image at the bottom of each post. I’ve tweaked it a bit so it has proper alt text on the image.

So when you click this link, a new window will open allowing you to bookmark any of my posts with any bookmarking service you like. They offer even more than “Social Bookmarking reloaded” I believe, so there should be something there for everyone now.

Thank you again for your feedback! It’s very helpful, especially when not always seeing the effects of an idea.

Appologies to the commenter of my “Blog is moving” post: While your comment/warning was very much appreciated, I did not dare to try and migrate the database again to avoid breackage. Therefore, your comment “fell victim” to this move.

Over the next few hours, I’ll move this blog over to a new host. Hopefully if all goes well, you won’t notice much outage during that move period.

Also, all the best for 2008! May it be an enjoyable, productive, or in any way successful year for you!

My goal is to blog about everything and anything I deem important in the world of accessible software (or such that strives to become such). I’ll be talking about my work for Mozilla Corp. that starts on December 3rd, as well as other ideas, software and basically anything I or my readers might find interesting.

Please bear with me as I get all these WordPress defaults revamped, especially the blog roll.

Enjoy the read, and please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed at the bottom of the page!