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Professor Gonzalez

ENC 1102

3 March 2023

Annotated Bibliography

Chukwuere, Joshua. “Social Media Accessibility: Opportunities and Challenges for Rural

Communities.” International Conference on Emerging Technology and Interdisciplinary

Sciences, 2021, https://conferences.jozacpublishers.com/index.php/icetis/article/view/1/1.

In the article, it talks about the importance of social media and how it is a tool in

obtaining information. It specifically looks at the opportunities and challenges social media has

in rural communities (Chukwuere, 1). At the end of the article, it gives solutions on how to fix

the challenges to make social media more accessible to everyone. The author presented the

barriers that affect social media accessibility which include, awareness, culture,

cost/affordability, education, availability, ease of use, and perception and attitude (Chukwuere,

3). They concluded that creating an awareness of the problem with social media accessibility is

vital for solving the issues and creating a place where everyone, including people with

disabilities, is able to use it (Chukwuere, 5).

Although this source’s main focus was rural communities, it is useful to me because it

explains the importance of social media, which is the main focus of my research. It is important

for social media websites to be accessible with everyone because that is where most people get
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their information from. It is also important because it is the place where a lot of people

communicate with one another. Like the author said in the article, I think this topic should be

talked about more because our society is becoming much more digital, meaning everyone is

going to need to be able to access the internet. This article is credible because it was made in

2021, was published on a website called ICETIS, which selects technology experts to write the

articles, and presented their findings in an unbiased manner.

Hanson, Vicki, and John Richards. “Progress on Website Accessibility?” ACM Transactions on

the Web, 1 Mar. 2013, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2435215.2435217

Richards and Hanson’s purpose for writing this article was to analyze how topsites,

which are websites with high traffic, and government websites have changed over time

according to accessibility. They also go through all of the different web accessibility guidelines

made by WAI and WCAG, explaining what they are and how they have helped disabled people

be able to use websites that follow these guidelines (Richards, Hanson, 2-5). The results that

they obtain from looking at all of the government websites and topsites is that most of them

have a low number of features that make them accessible (Richards, Hanson, 27). In situations

where the website was very accessible, the authors considered that this may be because those

are just standard things that web designers make sure are on their website. This includes

headings, titles, and using styles instead of table layouts (Richards, Hanson, 25-26).

I thought this article was very useful because it provided me with the specific guidelines

that web designers use for making sure their site is accessible. Using this when doing my own
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research, I can find violations in the guidelines on the social media websites that I will be

analyzing that I wouldn’t have known about before reading this article. These guidelines will

help make my findings more accurate. I also thought the source was useful because they do a

similar method of conducting their research that I will be doing too. The article is a credible

source because it was made by multiple authors, was published in 2013, and is peer reviewed.

Hollier, Scott. “The Growing Importance of Accessible Social Media: 16: Disability and Social

Media.” Taylor & Francis, Taylor & Francis, 10 Nov. 2016,

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315577357-16/growing-
importance-accessible-social-media-scott-hollier.

Scott Hollier, the author of this article, talks about the benefits of social media for

disabled people. He gives examples of this by stating that disabled people are able to meet

people online before going to an event to share their disability with them and be more

comfortable with knowing someone at the event, disabled people are able to put their resumes

online, and are able to use social media as a source of entertainment (Hollier, 4). The author

also goes over how some social media websites has changed over the years according to

accessibility. Although there have been improvements, he goes over the issues that are still

occurring on these sites. The final topic of his research article goes over how social media is

moving towards cloud computing and shares the benefits and costs of this towards disabled

people (Hollier, 7-9).

The source is useful to me because it specifically talks about the accessibility of social

media websites, which is the topic I am researching about. It helps provide me with information
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on the importance of having social media usable for everyone and addressed the issues that

may occur with social media accessibility in the future. The source brought light on a subject of

accessibility that I hadn’t thought of before, which is cloud computing. Although my research is

not going to be about this, it gave me an insight of a topic that should be researched more

about. The article is credible because it was published recently, the author specializes in the

digital accessibility field, and the author is legally blind, so he understands the importance of

accessibility on websites.

Jenkinson, Philip. “Social Media Accessibility and Inclusion Is a Crucial Consideration –

ProQuest.” ProQuest, 2017,

https://www.proquest.com/docview/1937364095?pq-origsite=summon.

In this article, Jenkinson talks about the importance of having accessible social media

websites since this is the place where most people get their information from (Philip, 1). He

focuses his evaluation on four popular platforms. This consisted of blogging, Facebook, Twitter,

and YouTube. Some of the most common things he noticed is that videos and pictures did not

have any captions on them, layouts of some blogs were hard to read due to the font style, there

was not a clearable font size on some posts, and much more (Philip, 1-4). Jenkinson wrote this

article to get people more aware of the problem that a large amount of the population, which

are people who have disabilities, are having trouble accessing the internet because websites

tend to not apply the proper associability guidelines on their sites.

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I found this source to be useful because it has given me a few ideas on what to look for

when doing my own research. I can see if some of these common accessibility issues that have

occurred in his study will be present in the social media websites from the past that I will be

looking at. It will be interesting to see how much worse the social media websites were

according to accessibility in the past. I can use this too, to see how much they have grown over

the years. This source is credible because it is a scholarly journal that was published in the

University of Central Florida Library Database, was published recently, and explains his

information in an unbiased manner.

Peters, Cara, and David Bradbard. “Web Accessibility: an Introduction and Ethical

Implications.” ProQuest, 2010,

https://www.proquest.com/docview/1011912539/fulltext/2856B5690A454009PQ/1?
accountid=10003.

The authors’ main focus of this article is to explain what web accessibility is, go over

how web accessibility can be achieved, examine how its ethics are important in a managerial

perspective, and include professional web designers’ backgrounds and opinions on web

accessibility (Peters, Bradbard, 1-2). They also highlighted lawsuits that have happened in

recent years against popular websites that did not use the proper tools and features that

allowed disabled people to navigate their website. A point that is made in the article is that

managers of businesses who take part in the web development process are more likely to

choose not to apply web accessibility features because it cost too much (Peters, Bradbard, 20).

However, the benefits outweigh the cons, including that there will be more people using your
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site, the company won’t get negative publicity because of this, and it is the morally right thing

to do (Peters, Bradbard, 20). They suggest that the way to stop websites from being

inaccessible is to make people more aware about the problem (Peters, Bradbard, 22).

I thought this article was useful to my research because it goes over a lot of different

aspects relating to website accessibility. It can help me learn more about the issues surrounding

it and it provided me with a different perspective of web accessibility coming from a web

designer’s view. The source also gave me an insight into some of the legal situations that have

revolved around this issue. This is a very credible source because it is a scholarly journal in the

University of Central Florida Library Database, has two authors, was recently written, and was

unbiased on the topic. When working on my own research paper, I will consider the

information that was presented in this article and compare them to my research that I find to

see what some of the common qualities are.