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Web 2.0: Twitter and the blind

Published: 13 September 2011 Publication History

Abstract

The latest Internet phenomenon is Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that in just a few years has attracted millions of users. With short messages (tweets), following and followers, Twitter is reshaping ways of interacting online. Thus, its accessibility is very important for social interaction as well as for work. In this paper we discuss the accessibility of Twitter for blind users interacting via screen reader and voice synthesizer. First, basic functions such as registration, login, posting and reading tweets have been analyzed highlighting accessibility issues, then a discussion is based on the analyzed case study, offering suggestions for designers.

References

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W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ (5 Dec 2008)
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Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T. and Tseng, B. 2007. Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis (WebKDD/SNA-KDD '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 56--65. DOI=10.1145/1348549.1348556 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1348549.1348556
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Huberman, B. A., Romero, D. M. and Wu, F. 2008. Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1313405
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Ebner, M., and Reinhardt, W. 2009. Social networking in scientific conferences - Twitter as tool for strengthen a scientific Community. In U. Cress; V. Dimitrova, & M. Specht (Eds.), Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines. 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2009 Nice, France. Berlin: Springer.
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Grosseck, G. and Holotescu, C. 2008. Can we use Twitter for educational activities? In 4th International Scientific Conference eLSE "eLearning and Software for Education", Bucharest, http://adl.unap.ro/else/
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Cha, M., Haddadi, H., Benevenuto, F. and Gummadi, K. P. 2010. Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy. In Proceedings of the Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 10--17.
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Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H. and Moon, S. 2010. What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World Wide Web (WWW '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 591--600. DOI=10.1145/1772690.1772751 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1772690.1772751
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Zhao, D. and Rosson, M. B. 2009. How and why people Twitter: the role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. In Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 243--252. DOI=10.1145/1531674.1531710 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1531674.1531710
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Honeycutt, C. and Herring, S. C. 2009. Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, In Proceedings of 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) 1--10.
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  • (2025)“Talking the Same Language”: The Influence of Sharing a Visual Impairment Identity Between Researchers and Participants on Enhancing Participant Recruitment and Fostering Rapport During Interviews With Blind IndividualsInternational Journal of Qualitative Methods10.1177/1609406925132085824Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Knocking on doors: The use of blogging sites by visually impaired people in the USA preliminary studyConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/13548565241261963Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Breaking the News Barrier: Towards Understanding News Consumption Practices among BVI Individuals in IndiaProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675608(1-11)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
CHItaly '11: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCHI Italian Chapter International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Facing Complexity
September 2011
177 pages
ISBN:9781450308762
DOI:10.1145/2037296
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 September 2011

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. blind
  3. screen reader
  4. social network
  5. usability
  6. web 2.0

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  • Research-article

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CHItaly '11
Sponsor:
  • SIGCHI Italy
CHItaly '11: Facing complexity
September 13 - 16, 2011
Alghero, Italy

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CHItaly '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 59 submissions, 49%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 109 of 242 submissions, 45%

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Cited By

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  • (2025)“Talking the Same Language”: The Influence of Sharing a Visual Impairment Identity Between Researchers and Participants on Enhancing Participant Recruitment and Fostering Rapport During Interviews With Blind IndividualsInternational Journal of Qualitative Methods10.1177/1609406925132085824Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Knocking on doors: The use of blogging sites by visually impaired people in the USA preliminary studyConvergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/13548565241261963Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Breaking the News Barrier: Towards Understanding News Consumption Practices among BVI Individuals in IndiaProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675608(1-11)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2022)Developing Accessible Websites for Differently Abled People Using Open Source ToolsInternational Journal of Software Innovation10.4018/IJSI.30357610:1(1-21)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2022
  • (2022)Authoring accessible media content on social networksProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3544882(1-11)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2021)COVID-19 Salgını Sürecinde Uzaktan Eğitime İlişkin Tweetlerin Duygusal AnaliziSentiment Analysis of Tweets Relating to Distance Education during the Covid-19 PandemicJournal of Computer and Education Research10.18009/jcer.9507909:18(853-868)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2021
  • (2020)Future research directions for accessible social mediaACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing10.1145/3412836.3412839(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2020
  • (2020)Emoji Accessibility for Visually Impaired PeopleProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376267(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
  • (2019)Twitter Üzerindeki İslamofobik Twitlerin Duygu Analizi ile TespitiGazi Üniversitesi Fen Bilimleri Dergisi Part C: Tasarım ve Teknoloji10.29109/gujsc.5618067:2(495-502)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2019
  • (2019)Addressing the Accessibility of Social MediaCompanion Publication of the 2019 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3311957.3359439(474-479)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2019
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