Future research directions for accessible social media

Abstract

Social media platforms are deeply ingrained in society, and they offer many different spaces for people to engage with others. Unfortunately, accessibility barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in these spaces. Social media users commonly post inaccessible media, including videos without captions (which are important for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing) and images without alternative text (descriptions read aloud by screen readers for people who are blind). Users with motor impairments must find workarounds to deal with the complex user interfaces of these platforms, and users with cognitive disabilities may face barriers to composing and sharing information. We invited accessibility researchers, industry practitioners, and end-users with disabilities to come together at the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work conference (CSCW 2019) to discuss challenges and solutions for improving social media accessibility. Over the course of a day that included two panels and breakout sessions, the workshop attendees outlined four critical future research directions to progress on the path to accessible social media: tooling to support disabled people authoring content, developing more accessible formats/tools for new forms of interaction (e.g, Augmented and Mixed Reality), using communities to distribute accessibility labor, and ensuring machine learning systems are built on representative datasets for disability use-cases.