The focus of this Special Thematic Session is Social Media and accessibility. It covers both access to Social Media, and inclusion by use of Social Media.

Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are now important communication platforms in most people’s lives, for communication between friends, among family members, within interest groups, and with public services. Still, there is a lack of system interoperability and respect for e-accessibility standards and individual user needs and desires.

Social media services are developing fast, at a speed accelerated by competition in the marketplace. New designs and features are frequently introduced, but e-accessibility is not a key priority for the companies providing the services, or for developers of third party add-ons.

Social Media is a powerful way to identify interest groups, find like minded people, and to organize and carry out activities to influence society, or to collect and disseminate information of value.

With this STS, we want to focus on (e)-accessibility and social media from two different perspectives. Firstly, we’re interested in work on eaccessibility and social media. We invite papers ranging from surveys to implementation guidelines and standardization work. The goal is to describe status on e-accessibility to social media, and to present work in progress to ensure equal opportunities for access to an increasingly important set of communication channels.

Secondly, we want to hear about work covering the use of Social Media to achieve an accessible society. This includes organization of activities, distributed standardization work, use of open API’s, and the use of Social Media to collect and share information about accessible services and physical environments (such as route planners).

Additionaly, the STS welcomes contributions about privacy concerns and identity management in Social Media.

Questions about the STS can be directed to Harald Holone (harald.holone@hiof.no).

Contributions to the STS have to be submitted using the standard submission procedures of ICCHP.

Chair

• 
  Harald Holone, Faculty of Computer Sciences, Østfold University College, Halden, Norway.