ASSETS 2009 - End-User Moderation of Cognitive Accessibility in Online Communities: Case Study of Brain Fog in the Lyme Community

End-User Moderation of Cognitive Accessibility in Online Communities: Case Study of Brain Fog in the Lyme Community

Kateryna Kuksenok and Jennifer Mankoff

Eleventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - Posters and Demos (ASSETS 2009)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 26-28, 2009

Summary

With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies, more and more online content is being generated by users. Even trained web developers often fail to take accessibility issues into consideration, so it is no surprise that users may fail to do so as well. In this paper, we examine two self-moderating communities of individuals with Lyme disease who are affected by “brain fog”. Through qualitative analysis of over 100 discussion threads that deal with issues of accessibility, we explore how the individuals in these communities fail and succeed to establish and enforce, through moderation, the creation of cognitively accessible content.