Social media for higher education certainly has its benefits. From social learning and mobile learning to administrative apps and campus news, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become common tools for student engagement. As the popularity of social media in education grows, it is important to consider the accessibility of the applications that we are asking students to interact with. Marco Zehe recently posted a very thorough analysis of the accessibility of some of the most popular social media outlets and their mobile applications. It is an excellent overview of the accessibility of the programs themselves, their mobile apps, and recommended clients that can offer a more accessible interface. He does say it is a very sad picture, and it truly is.
I was glad to read that Zehe recommends EasyChirp as a web-based, cross-platform accessible interface for Twitter. Twitter’s newest update, New Twitter, is quite lacking in accessibility. I won’t go into detail as Zehe discuss those issues in his post. In his discussions of the mobile applications, he did not mention whether the use of EasyChirp in a mobile device’s browser was accessible to VoiceOver (iOS) or Talkback (Android). I had issues using the Speak Selection feature with EasyChirp in Safari on the iPad2. I would be very interested to hear from users of VoiceOver and Talkback. I tried VoiceOver with EasyChirp on iPad2 and had some difficulty, but I do not use the program as well as a typical user would.
From Zehe’s post it sounds like Facebook and its mobile apps are completely inaccessible. Facebook’s accessibility page does address some common questions, but none of the information that Zehe discusses is mentioned. This is a bummer, the features of Facebook can be really useful for social learning and if they were accessible I would highly recommend it, but now I guess I cannot.
Google Plus
This is almost not even worth mentioning. Google Plus just has not caught on as well as they thought it would. But, either way, both the web version and iOS app are very inaccessible. So just don’t use it because it is not very popular and it is not accessible.
Yammer
I have never even heard of this. Yammer is a social network to collaborate with coworkers. Apparently is is not accessible in the web and iOS versions.
identi.ca
Another platform I had not hear of. identi.ca is a micro-blogging tool similar to Twitter; however, it is completely accessible out of the box, no clients required. Yes, I will certainly be familiarizing myself with this tool! It is interesting that this is the only open-source product he reviewed.
Others
He did not cover some of the other social media tools that I have been looking into while preparing for questions about using social media with distance learning courses. Here is a list of others that I will be looking into and will certainly post any information I find useful to my blog and/or twitter:
- WordPress
- Diggo
- Delicious
- Hootsuite
Please share your experiences or resources with any of these or other social media outlets.
