Accessibility and Usability of Web Archives

Web archives are digital repositories that use autonomous web crawlers to collect various types of web content, such as web pages, videos, pictures, books, and social media data, for long-term preservation. Web archives such as the Wayback Machine store ‘snapshots’ of web pages at different time intervals, enabling users to access prior versions of web pages that may have been altered or even removed from the corresponding websites. Therefore, web archives serve as an important resource for researchers, analysts, and the general public for a variety of tasks, including fact-checking, searching historical information, tracking public opinion changes, tracking the spread of false narratives, understanding patterns of misinformation propagation, and ultimately promoting information accuracy and credibility on the internet. Given the importance of web archives, it is essential that they are equally accessible to people who are blind. However, little is known about how accessible and usable these web archives are for blind people. In this presentation, we will shed light on this topic by discussing the accessibility and usability of some of the popular web archives. Join Zoom Meeting https://odu.zoom.us/j/93921610804