Accessibility for People with Cerebral Palsy: The use of Blogs as an Agent of Social Inclusion

Abstract

Cerebral palsy is a brain injury, which depending on the affected site, can impair a person's movements. In extreme cases, the consequences brought about by physical disability may influence the social exclusion of the individual. The situation may be aggravated by problems with speech and vision. In addition, low purchasing power, which is commonplace, can hinder the citizen's adaptation to the routines of everyday life and keep him/her from accessing software and hardware. These resources, if well designed, tend to contribute to the social inclusion of computer users, and in particular using the web as a communication tool. Among the systems found on the web, blogging, due to its interactive features, was selected as a research subject. For these reasons, this paper addresses the identification and analysis of problems of accessibility and usability in web access to public blogs by users with cerebral palsy, proposing a list of recommendation s for developers of blog publishing systems.