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Accessible Folksonomies

2/27/2005

I’ve been working with web technology for over a decade now and I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an idea gain mindshare as rapidly as the Folksonomy has. It seems like everywhere I turn someone is discussing this new categorization system.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, a folksonomy is basically a taxonomy created by the people and for the people. A community of users collaborates by “tagging” various types of content with user created keywords. This concept is flourishing on a handful of community driven sites that all seem to have a certain addictive quality. I think the best way to fully grasp how folksonomies work is to dive into one of the sites that makes use of the concept. Flickr, 43things, and del.icio.us are good places to start. Given the success of these early experiments in group tagging I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing folksonomies implemented on all sorts of sites in the very near future.

Lately I’ve been thinking about one particular artifact of the folksonomy phenomenon — the folksonomy menu that serves as a sort of buzz index providing users with a quick visualization of the most popular tags (technically I think it’s called a weighted list). Popular tags are displayed in a larger font and it’s relatively easy to identify hot topics at a glance. This visual representation of the popularity of any given tag is undeniably cool. However, once the coolness factor wears off it becomes fairly obvious that these menus are also not very accessible.

I realize these sites are currently trail-blazers and they deserve to be recognized as such. I have no intention of detracting from the innovative work that’s being done. My concern is that once folksonomies enter the mainstream, the next wave of sites implementing them will likely begin a wholesale copying of the work that’s being done by these innovators — markup and all.

Also, I need to point out that folksonomies are community driven. A few minor changes to the existing markup would go a long way towards making these communities accessible to everyone.

Analysis of the accessibility of weighted lists on five websites using group tagging and folksonomy

I spent an afternoon looking under the hood of the folksonomy menus on following sites:

I was somewhat surprised to find that the markup on each of the folksonomy menu pages was entirely different. While all sites were basically implementing the same type of menu they all arrived at their respective results in different ways. Given this finding, I was even more surprised to note that each site shared most the same accessibility problems:

Recommendations:

The good news is that these issues are all easily fixed. Most of the solutions will be quite obvious.

Here’s a page demonstrating my recommendations.

I realize that it can be challenging to focus on these types of details while innovating in the way that each of these sites has. While folksonomies are still relatively new, I think we’ve reached a point where it’s time to start thinking seriously about best practices.

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