Addressing the Accessibility of Social Media

Social media platforms are deeply ingrained in society, and they offer many different spaces for people to engage with others. Unfortunately, accessibility barriers prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in these spaces. Social media users commonly post inaccessible media, including videos without captions (which are important for people who are deaf or hard of hearing) and images without alternative text (descriptions read aloud by screen readers for people who are blind). Users with motor impairments must find workarounds to deal with the complex user interfaces of these platforms, and users with cognitive disabilities may face barriers to composing and sharing information. Accessibility researchers, industry practitioners, and end-users with disabilities will come together to outline challenges and solutions for improving social media accessibility. The workshop starts with a panel of end-users with disabilities who will recount their Perspectives of Successes and Barriers. Industry professionals from social media companies (e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn) will detail their Design Process and Implementation Challenges in a panel with questions from attendees. The attendees will share their work and tackle Open Challenges and Future Research Directions. This workshop will forge collaborations between researchers and practitioners, and define high-priority accessibility challenges for social media platforms

Dyslexia and password usage:accessibility in authentication design

Governments and businesses are moving online with alacrity, driven by potential cost savings, changing consumer and citizen expectations, and the momentum towards general digital provision. Services are legally required to be inclusive and accessible. Now consider that almost every online service, where people have to identify themselves, requires a password. Passwords seem to be accessible, until one considers specific disabilities, one of which can lead to many challenges: dyslexia being a case in point. Dyslexia is associated with word processing and retention difficulties, and passwords are essentially words, phrases or alphanumeric combinations. We report on a literature review conducted to identify extant research into the impact of dyslexia on password usage, as well as any ameliorations that have been proposed. We discovered a relatively neglected field. We conclude with recommendations for future research into the needs of a large population of dyslexics who seem to struggle with passwords, in a world where avoiding passwords has become almost impossible. The main contribution of this paper is to highlight the difficulties dyslexics face with passwords, and to suggest some avenues for future research in this area

The state of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities: a rapid evidence assessment

Increased digitisation of day-to-day activities was occurring prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic only accelerated the virtual shift, making web accessibility an urgent issue, especially for marginalised populations. Despite decades of work to develop, refine, and implement web accessibility standards, people with cognitive disabilities regularly experience many barriers to web accessibility. To inform ongoing work to improve web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities, a systematic review was conducted. The main question guiding this review is: what are the state-of-the-art of interventions that support web accessibility for citizens, 9 years of age and up, living with cognitive impairment? A set of 50 search strings were entered into three academic databases: SCOPUS, ProQuest, and Web of Science. Systematic screening procedures narrowed the search returns to a total of 45 included papers. A data analysis revealed themes associated with the lived experiences of people with cognitive disabilities, tools for improving web accessibility, and methodological best practices for involving people with cognitive disabilities in research. These findings have immediate implications for ongoing research and the development of meaningful solutions to the problem of web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Dysleksi: Tidlige risikomarkører for dysleksi

The purpose of this master's thesis was to investigate whether or not students who were identified with poor literacy skills at 3rd grade, displayed poor literacy skills at the start of 1st grade and in 2nd grade. The theoretical framework for the master's thesis is the prevailing etiological model for dyslexia, namely the Multiple Deficit Model (MDM). It suggests that dyslexia (and other developmental disorders) are multifactorial, and that several genetic risk factors interact with each other and with several environmental risk factors resulting in disorders on the behavioral level. The analyzes in the master's thesis are based on longitudinal data from the Tromsø Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (TLD), which has followed a cohort of children over several years, and their parents. The children were grouped according to scores above or below 20th percentile on a reading test in the 3rd grade. The groups were compared on letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid naming and working memory in 1st and 2nd grade. The results showed that phoneme isolation, rapid naming and working memory are cognitive risk markers for poor reading skills, and that the difficulties are present even before school entry and before the start of formal reading and writing training. The percentage of children with reading difficulties who also had parents with writing difficulties, were higher than for the children wo did not. These findings have important implications for preventive work and early intervention in kindergarten and school.Sammendrag Hensikten med denne masteroppgaven var å undersøke om elever som ble identifisert med svake skriftspråkferdigheter på 3. trinn, også hadde vansker med skriftspråkrelaterte ferdigheter på henholdsvis 1. og 2. trinn. Den teoretiske rammen for masteroppgaven er den rådende etiologiske modellen for dysleksi, nemlig «flervanske-modellen» eller Multiple Deficit Model (MDM). Den foreslår at dysleksi (og andre utviklingsforstyrrelser) er multifaktoriell, og at flere genetiske risikovarianter samhandler med hverandre og med flere miljørisikoer for til slutt å produsere lidelsen på atferdsnivå. Analysene i masteroppgaven er basert på longitudinelle data fra Dysleksistudien i Tromsø, som har fulgt et utvalg barn fra over flere år og deres foreldre. Barna ble gruppert etter skåre over eller under 20 persentil på en lesetest på 3. trinn. Gruppene ble deretter sammenlignet på bokstavkunnskap, fonologisk bevissthet, hurtigbenevning og arbeidsminne på 1.og 2. trinn. Resultatene viste at fonemisolasjon, hurtigbenevning og arbeidsminne er kognitive risikomarkører for svake leseferdigheter, og at vanskene er til stede allerede før skolestart og før oppstarten av formell lese- og skriveopplæring. Prosentvis flere barn med skrivevansker hadde foreldre med skrivevansker. Disse funnene har viktige implikasjoner for forebyggende arbeid og tidlig innsats i barnehage og skole