- Crowdsourced accessibility (not sure if this fits here but mostly thinking of how cscw systems can help provision access as well)
- SoundPrint, DeafFriendly, BeMyEyes
- Opensource projects: NVDA
- Datasets: VizWhiz, ASLCitizen
---
# Study of End User Content Creation
Although guidelines for tools and for authorship exist, inaccessible
content is still created.
- How do communities react
- How could authoring tools help this?
.quote[I wan't able to read your entire post.
Maybe you could go back and break up your paragraphs so they are easier to read?]
???
This quote is taken from a study investigating communities that take an active role in fostering a culture of accessibility, using both formal and informal practices of moderating inaccessible content.
---
# Case Study 1: Wikipedia
Sample size: 179 discussions, 82 contributors
Of 82, 10 “moderators” – declared members
Qualitative analysis (coding themes)
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# What Accessibility Process does Wikipedia Have?
Formal discussion of policy such as Manual of Style
Process of feedback / moderation
.quote[[Marking articles as accessible] would be as if people went and marked templates as ‘This is an article with a Neutral POV’ and ‘This is an article that is well referenced’]
---
# Key Activity: Moderation
When moderating content accessibility, a moderator provides advice, guidance, or critique relating to an author’s content through
- Talk pages
- Flags
---
# Key Activity: Moderation
Authority is important for moderators, because sometimes authors did not want to comply with moderator requests.
Moderators sometimes idealized the process
.quote[It isn’t that hard to make sure a page is accessible - just use conventional formatting and heading standards -- M2]
---
# Key Activity: Moderation
In reality, moderators and authors spent significant time on tensions
between accessibility goals and other editing goals. For example,
- Remove valued moving images
- Increase markup (in violation of another
Wikipedia policy)
- Change page titles (affecting google search
results).
Additionally, some authors simply disagreed with or reverted
changes made by moderators.
???
- Is an animation a distraction or useful?
- Is it ok to use the Pi symbol π
- Semantic versus visual formatting: End user content creation tools limit changes to header formatting, pushing authors to do more visual formatting
---
# Key Activity: Advocacy
.quote[I could be [an author advocate] but what exactly would I say? "Don’t ban this person, they have [disability]."? That might not work.]
.quote[No, how about "Hi, this user has identified herself as (having a condition), which is probably why (this problem arose). Before we ban her … she seems to have her heart in the right place and has a lot to offer our community. Obviously, this would not apply to users who are violent or angry…" ]
???
Those 10 moderators were concerned that not everyone would speak up, and discussed pro-actively addressing situations.
<readquotes>
Discussions of moderator-initiated author advocacy in the data lacked any reference to whether it had actually been done successfully or whether authors would want this.
---
# Why is this interesting
All of these may occur in a wide variety of settings
- Complex organizational structure
- Separation between authors and consumers
- Use of GUIs for creating content
---
# Case Study #2: Lymespace
Users actively intervene to improve accessibility, relative to cognitive symptoms of Lyme disease
“Brain fog” affects use of online content
- Distraction when faced with visuals ranging from animated advertisements to bold text
- Difficulty remembering the start of a long passage by the end of the same passage
- Getting lost among multiple pages of content
---
# Investigated Moderation
What kinds of moderation occurs? How to users respond?
- Qualitative analysis of 6 authors and their moderators
When does moderation occur and what happens after?
- Quantitative analysis of 600 threads
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# Quantitative Impact of Moderation
.left-column60[
]
.right-column40[
Metrics
- Characters per paragraph
- Capitalization (%)
- Punctuation (%)
- Bold (%)
]
---
# Were moderated posts less accessible?
---
# Were moderated posts less accessible?
---
# Alternatives to Moderation
"Soft Paternalism" [Mack et al, 2021](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3441852.3471207)
Interfaces that suggest what to include in alt text are beneficial
- Leads to more complete, detailed ALT text
- Structure helps (e.g. types of content to cinclude)
