Are there any Social Networks dedicated for people with special needs?
Are there any Social Networks dedicated for people with special needs ?
There are thousands of people who are left blind, dumb and with other disability and the number keeps rising everyday. The rise in the number of disability may rise as a result of war, natural disasters and etc. Present Social Networks Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare (name it) doesn't provide there service to disable people, therefore i sense that there is an urgent need for disables to connect and share day-to-day hardships and triumphs in life.
Please view your thoughts on this matter. Do you think we need an alternative social network that is dedicated for disability ? If so we could build one
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The reason why i suggested to have a different social network for disables is that, it's easy to maintain the application, add features and improvements to it (that would suit disables). If we are to integrate our disable friendly social media with Facebook or any other Social Network, we will definitely come across issues while trying to integrate there social network to our application. Every time Facebook changes a functionality or adds a feature, we have to constantly keep updating/modifying our application to adhere to it. So having our own social media created will definitely overcome this problem.
Recently i created an application that could send a tweet or an email by patients who has neuro-muscular disorders (total-paralysis). what i found is that, social media could definitely make an impact of the lives of disables as they could share there day-to-day hardships and triumphs in life. However, i agree with the two of you that creating a separate social network for disables would separate able users with disables, so i hope existing organizations who are involved in social media would come forward and address this issue.
Your thoughts on this...
Maybe it would be more feasible to merge "mobile" and "accessible" versions into a unified interface?
The issue with building a separate network is that it singles out people with disabilities, meaning they'll have less people to connect with, and would most likely feel ostracized. If accessibility is a big issue with current social networks, it's probably best solved like any other issue - get a lot of people talking about it and make sure the right people at Facebook (or any other company) are aware of exactly what needs to be changed.
That said, are the mobile versions not adequately accessible? What sort of disabilities aren't being accounted for? We have screen readers, text magnification, tablets, touchscreen phones, desktop computers, laptops, braille terminals.. even Simple English Wikipedia. I'm sure there are plenty of edge cases, but some concrete examples would help the discussion.