Liberty and Accessibility

Thursday, September 14, 2006

What is Experimentrak.net? This is a site that universities use to make it easier for students to participate in studies and to help professors and their research staff keep track of appointments. At my university (University of South Florida), Psychology students can get extra credit for signing up for studies. All of this is good if you're a sighted student or researcher. However, if you're a blind student or research assistant, you can't use this sight. As I said in my previous entry, we arrow down to links and hit enter to follow them. However, you can't do this with a lot of the links on experimentrak.net. As an example, when I go to usf.experimentrak.net to log in, I can't activate the "researchers" or the "participants" links. Therefore, I can't log in to register for experiments or to access experiments as a researcher. Academic research is supposed to be ethical. Is it ethical for universities to use software that discourages people with a disability from participating in research studies? I'm not sure that it is. For this reason, I'm asking all universities who use experimentrak.net to either put pressure on the company to make their site accessible or to switch to another company.

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