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AJAX paper

3.2 Facebook:

Facebook is currently the fastest growing social networking sites. It uses AJAX to deliver some of its functionality to the user.  This is mostly used when sending messages or sending another user a ‘poke’. 

 

Accessibility issues:
With JavaScript disabled some functionality still works on Facebook. Sending a ‘poke’ is enabled to take the user to a separate page that ‘pokes’ the user. It also detects an old version of a browser and displays a message informing the user that they should upgrade the browser to get a better performance from the site. However the optimism of this is lost when attempting other more useful functions on the site. To be able to write a message and send it to a friend requires JavaScript to be turned on, this can restrict some users. The site becomes fairly inoperable with css or JavaScript disabled.

All of the above is valid only once a user has navigated the 100’s of links and the improper use of headers to apply formatting in a way that breaks up sentences. Overall the site is hard to understand through screen reader software and as there is not a no-script alternative for some of the common functions, it has no alternative mechanism to be interacted with.

 

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