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Disability users’ evaluation of the web accessibility of SNS

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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.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Dong-A University research fund.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Management Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588-0491, USA

    Sang M. Lee

  2. Department of Management Information Systems, Dong-A University, Pusan, Korea

    Soon-Goo Hong & Hyun-Mi Lee

  3. Korea Web Accessibility Certification Center (KWACC), Seoul, Korea

    Dong-Han An

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  1. Sang M. Lee
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  2. Soon-Goo Hong
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  3. Dong-Han An
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  4. Hyun-Mi Lee
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Correspondence to Soon-Goo Hong.

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Lee, S.M., Hong, SG., An, DH. et al. Disability users’ evaluation of the web accessibility of SNS. Serv Bus 8, 517–540 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11628-013-0205-y

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