Disability users’ evaluation of the web accessibility of SNS

Sang Lee (slee1@unl.edu), Soon-Goo Hong (shong@dau.ac.kr), Dong-Han An (hany92@nate.com) and Hyun-Mi Lee (gusal33@naver.com)

Service Business, 2014, vol. 8, issue 4, 517-540

Abstract: Social network service (SNS) is an effective communication tool for the community of disabled people. However, there is a general paucity of research on web accessibility of SNSs. This study investigates web accessibility of four SNSs that are most popular among disabled people: Facebook, Twitter, Me2day, and Yozm. Eight disabled individuals were selected according to the type of disability: two with total blindness, two with low vision, two with brain lesions, and two with an upper extremity disability. The subjects were asked to perform four navigation-related tasks and ten general tasks for each SNS. The success rate of their performances and user satisfaction levels were then measured. The four SNSs, on average, attained a task success rate of 73 % and a user satisfaction score of 3.1 points (max. = 5), indicating that the disabled participants found the websites generally inconvenient. As a pioneering evaluative study of the web accessibility of major SNS sites for the disabled, this research contributes to both theory and practice. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: SNS; Web accessibility; User evaluation; Disabled people (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11628-013-0205-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:svcbiz:v:8:y:2014:i:4:p:517-540

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/business/journal/11628

DOI: 10.1007/s11628-013-0205-y

Access Statistics for this article

Service Business is currently edited by S.M. Lee and J. Millet Roig

More articles in Service Business from Springer, Pan-Pacific Business Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).