MASTER THESIS in Universal Design of ICT May 2017 The Accessibility of Chinese Social Media for People with Visual Impairments – the case of Weibo Zhifeng Liu Department of Computer Science Faculty of Technology, Art and Design Preface and Acknowledgement China is just beginning to pay attention to accessibility. There are 83 million people with disabilities in China, including 13 million people with visual impairments. Weibo is one of the most popular social media. There are 100 million daily active users. Almost every Chinese has his own Weibo account, which showed that Weibo has inevitable influence. It would be meaningful if Weibo is fully accessible, especially for people with visual impairments. Thus, through this project I would like to contribute to the research and practice concerning accessibility in China. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor Weiqin Chen for providing important instruction in the project and writing-up process. Secondly, I acknowledge the contribution of Information Accessibility Research Association (IARA) in China and the participants involving in survey and user testing for their support in this project. A research paper “How accessible is Weibo for people with visual impairments” based on this project has been accepted as a full paper by the AAATE 2017 (The Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe). 15 May 2017, Oslo Zhifeng Liu 1 Abstract Weibo is one of the most widely used social media in China. It is the Chinese Twitter, which allow users to post 140 Chinese characters. Weibo has 100 million daily active users. People usually use it to get news and share their opinions since Weibo serves as micro-blogging. There are at least 13 million people with visual impairments.If the information on Internet are accessible, they can surf online as people without disabilities.Our survey showed that also people with visual impairments use Weibo to get news and share their minds. Weibo consists of multimedia, such as text, images, videos and audios. As a website with mobile applications, Weibo also has common elements, such as navigation, robustness etc. If these are not fully accessible, they can create barriers for the visually impaired. For instance, no alterative text for non-text content and low colour contrast. There exists research focusing on the accessibility of social media services such as Facebook, twitter etc. These services are not available in China. To our knowledge, there is no previous research concerning the accessibility of Weibo. This project aims to identify the accessibility issues of Weibo for people with visual impairments and provide recommendations for improving accessibility. Three evaluation methods were used in this project, including automatic testing, heuristic testing and user testing. AChecker, AccessLint.com and the WAVE evaluation tool were chosen for automatic testing. People with visual impairments were involved in user testing. Based on the evaluations, we found that the most frequent accessibility issues for the visually impaired included lacking alternative text for non-text content, ambiguous description of buttons and labels, no Hotkey setting, illogical layout and inaccessible web widgets used, disabled resize options and low contrast. Based on the findings, we consider Weibo as not fully accessible for people with visual impairments and made recommendations for improvements, including providing alternative text for non-text content, providing Hotkeys and ARIA tags for easier and efficient keyboard navigation, improving colour contrast and logic page design, providing resize options and context- sensitive support. 2 Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgement.................................................................................................. 1 Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... 2 Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ 3 List of Figures ................................................................................................................................... 6 List of Tables .................................................................................................................................... 7 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 8 1.1 Background ........................................................................................................................ 8 1.2 Demographics .................................................................................................................... 9 1.3 Accessibility issues........................................................................................................... 11 1.4 Purpose and research question ...................................................................................... 13 2 Literature Review .................................................................................................................. 15 2.1 Social Media .................................................................................................................. 15 2.1.1 Classification of worldwide Social Media ................................................................. 15 2.1.2 Users of Social Media ............................................................................................... 17 2.1.3 Influence of Social Media ......................................................................................... 18 2.2 Chinese Social Media .................................................................................................. 18 2.2.1 Wechat ..................................................................................................................... 19 2.2.2 Weibo ....................................................................................................................... 19 2.2.3 Mobile social media ................................................................................................. 21 2.3 Accessibility of non-Chinese Social Media ............................................................... 22 2.3.1 Facebook ................................................................................................................ 23 2.3.2 Twitter ...................................................................................................................... 26 2.3.3 Wikipedia................................................................................................................. 28 2.4 Accessibility of Chinese Social Media ....................................................................... 29 3 Methodology ........................................................................................................................ 32 3.1 General on Survey........................................................................................................ 32 3.2 Automatic Testing ......................................................................................................... 33 3.2.1 Automatic Tools ....................................................................................................... 33 3.3 General on Heuristic .................................................................................................... 37 3.4 User Testing .................................................................................................................. 38 3.4.1 Observation .............................................................................................................. 38 3.4.2 Interview .................................................................................................................. 38 3 4 Testing .................................................................................................................................. 40 4.1 Survey .................................................................................................................................. 40 4.1.1 Questions designed .................................................................................................. 40 4.1.2 Platform .................................................................................................................... 42 4.2 Automatic Testing ........................................................................................................... 42 4.2.1 Weibo Webpages for Testing ................................................................................... 42 4.2.2 Automatic Tools used .............................................................................................. 48 4.3 Heuristic Testing .............................................................................................................. 48 4.3.1 Web Weibo ............................................................................................................... 49 4.3.2 Mobile Weibo ........................................................................................................... 51 4.4 User Testing ..................................................................................................................... 55 4.4.1 Participants ............................................................................................................... 55 4.4.2 Testing procedure ...................................................................................................