I read "Is accessibility being overlooked in favour of sociability?" posted by Elias.
In this blog, the writer discusses how difficult it is to get people to consider web accessibility when creating websites. I learned that many social media sites are now moving towards making their websites more accessible. I didn't know YouTube had a closed captioning option. With this feature, users have the ability to improve the captioning and upload the improved version. Facebook has added audio CAPTCHA so that people with vision impairments can still join their service. This is a web access barrier I had never considered. It is important to have applications that can tell whether a human is really in control, but if we only have visual CAPTCHA, how will the vision impaired ever sign up for online services?
I also learned about "Easy Chirp", which is an alternative to Twitter that is more user-friendly for those with disabilities. Reading about all of these alternatives and improvements that have to be created so that people with disabilities can view websites that we browse with such ease everyday makes me very thankful for my health and abilities. I am also very glad that people are beginning to consider some ways in which we can make social media tools more accessible for those with disabilities.