Diversity and Accessibility in WeNet: Accommodating the Needs of Users with Disabilities

The WeNet project aspires to develop a social media tool to foster community social relations, particularly among student populations. Diversity is an integral part of WeNet conceptually and practically. Considering the diverse needs and preferences of users, and connecting users to benefit from each other’s diversity, is a major goal of the WeNet research and development activities. Accordingly, we contemplate and accommodate different aspects of diversity to reach inclusive and diversity-aware technological solutions. A significant diversity aspect that is frequently ignored is disability. Visual impairment requires the most technical accommodations to enable students to use WeNet. Therefore, the focus of this paper is on how blind and visually impaired people use assistive technology, and how we can consider their needs within the WeNet framework. Thereby, we build on the social model of disability. This paper thus tackles how technical requirements should be prepared to meet the needs of the blind and visually impaired, and how we can provide equal accessibility within the WeNet proposed scenarios