Social media and accessibility

Abstract

Social media is an integral part of the web, and it is becoming even more important when it comes to employment prospects. People with disabilities already find it difficult to access employment and any web sites that are inaccessible to them makes the issue that much harder. LinkedIn is one social network that is becoming essential for employees in the twenty-first century. A subset of requirements from the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines were used to test how accessible LinkedIn is to people with disabilities. A large number of issues were found, indicating that LinkedIn is not an accessible social network and is unlikely to provide the same functionality to people with disabilities using the system as those provided to the general public.