The Social Accessibility Project is a utility that enables volunteers to make Web pages accessible to the visually impaired. Using an innovative new system, it gathers information about accessibility problems directly from visually impaired users. To address these problems, the Social Accessibility Project provides a tool to members of the open community that allows them to externally modify Web pages, successfully making the pages accessible while leaving all original content untouched.
This pilot service is focused on improving accessibility for screen reader users. Users encountering Web access problems anywhere at any time will be able to immediately report the problems to the Social Accessibility server.
Volunteers (called supporters) are quickly notified and can easily respond by creating and publishing the requested accessibility metadata. This published metadata is attached to the original Web page so that all users who visit the page may benefit from it.
Users are also able to make accessibility improvements to a page; landmarks can be submitted to the server and then made available to all screen reader users.
All of the metadata created for a page is available to the site owner. Currently, the Social Accessibility Project supports only one screen reader version. As such, the site owners will ideally view the page's metadata and make accessibility improvements directly on the page so that users with different screen reading software can benefit from the Social Accessibility Project. (To learn more about the supported screen reader version, please visit System Requirements)
The Social Accessibility system consists of tools and a server to enable collaborative authoring of metadata. The entire process will be enhanced by various features that encourage collaboration, such as comments, discussions, measurements, and incentives. Overall, the Social Accessibility system strives to be a new mechanism that makes the Web accessible in the Web 2.0 era and beyond.