A study of the accessibility of The Pirate Bay and the iTunes Store
David Furendal
Department of Computing Science
Umeå University, Sweden
Abstract
Downloading of music and videos from the Internet has become incredible popular. But can the systems for downloading these files be used by people with disabilities? This paper studies the accessibility of the popular file sharing system The Pirate Bay and the first successful online digital music store, the iTunes Store. The systems are evaluated from the perspective of five fictitious characters that are created with the interaction design tool, Personas. By using the systems in the same way that a user with low vision, blindness, dyslexia, colorblindness, deafness or motor impairments would use them, the strengths and weaknesses in the accessibility of each system is found. The study shows that The Pirate Bay is accessible to a high degree. This is much thanks to a well-considered design and the use of XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets for the user interface. The accessibility of the iTunes Store is poor. One reason for this is because the system is not designed to be used together with assistive technologies such as screen readers and keyboard shortcuts. The paper concludes with a discussion around the found results and how future systems of this type can, and must be accessible to a much higher degree.