Evaluating blind users’ accessibility to Facebook and Twitter pages of Örebro municipality.

Abstract: Nowadays government departments and businesses use social networking sites to communicate with stakeholders. Notable reasons for this ongoing change are that the numbers of users on social networking sites have increased dramatically during the past ten years. Other reasons for utilizing social networking sites are that it is cost effective, more interactive due to Web 2.0 technology, as well as public demand. Besides increased interactivity and related benefits for normal users, this change emerged with accessibility problems for disabled users, especially when government departments utilize social networking sites. The adapted pages of these sites should be accessible for the disabled according to standards. Örebro municipality also utilizes social networking websites pages and this study provides an overview of the social networking sites’ accessibility to blind users. The study evaluated Örebro municipality’s Facebook and Twitter pages accessibility, by automatic evaluation tools against selected attributes of blind users’ accessibility metrics which are also the guidelines of W3C. The result of the study shows that there is more development required to make these pages completely accessible to blind users. However, the selected official website page of Örebro municipality was found completely accessible to blind users when evaluated for comparison, by the same automatic evaluation tools and selected guidelines.