Emergency 2.0 Wiki, a voluntary body,
has developed an on-line Emergency 2.0 Wiki Accessibility Toolkit.
This toolkit is tailored for the sensory and mobility-impaired.
The online toolkit provides tips,
resources and apps to help people with a disability to overcome
accessibility challenges of social media.
“The reason for developing the kit is
that we’ve witnessed from recent disasters that social media can
save lives, but people with disabilities often have difficulty
accessing important messages because the social media platforms
themselves are inaccessible”, said Richard Corby, Emergency 2.0
Wiki Accessibility Reference Group Leader.
It’s vitally important that people
with disabilities, who are the most vulnerable in our communities
during emergencies, are empowered to access instant, lifesaving
messages through social media and the accessibility toolkit enables
this, stressed Corby.
Mr. Corby also mentions that for
example the main Twitter website can’t be easily read with a screen
reader, a program that reads out information on a screen for people
who are blind. In the kit they point users to alternative sites such
as Easy Chirp to read tweets. As people tweet in real time, an
accessible app such as this can provide immediate notification of
when a fire starts or when flash floods hit a town.
Accessibility resources on the wiki
include:
Tips and guides for people with
disabilities on how to access social media
Emergency smartphone apps for
people with a disability
Apps and assistive technologies to
access social media
Emergency Preparedness YouTube
videos that are either captioned or use sign language for the deaf
and hearing impaired
Practical guidelines to assist the
emergency sector, government, community, media and business to make
social media messages more accessible
In a whole of community approach, the
Accessibility Reference Group crowdsourced the content globally using
social media. The group consists of professionals drawn from the
emergency, government, NGO and business sectors in Australia, New
Zealand and the United States.
(Source: Emergency 2.0 Wiki)