Important links

• Paper (preprint)

Abstract

As social media platforms increasingly promote the use of user-enacted moderation tools (e.g., reporting, blocking, content filters) to address online harms, it becomes crucial that these controls be accessible to everyone. We evaluate the accessibility of moderation tools on two mainstream platforms – Facebook and X – through interviews and task-based walkthroughs with 15 individuals with vision impairments. Adapting insights from public administration scholarship, we introduce the lens of Administrative Burden of safety work and foreground three interleaved costs that users with vision loss incur while interacting with moderation tools: learning costs (understanding what controls do and where they live), compliance costs (executing multi-step procedures under screen reader and low-vision conditions), and psychological costs (experiencing uncertainty, stress, and diminished agency). Our analysis bridges the fields of content moderation and accessibility in HCI research and contributes (1) a cross-platform catalog of accessibility and usability breakdowns affecting safety tools; and (2) design recommendations for reducing this burden.

BibTeX citation

@article{hosamane2026accessibility,
author = {Hosamane, Sudhamshu and Walters, Alyvia and Lyu, Yao and Jhaver, Shagun},
title = {“I thought it was my mistake, but it’s really the design”: A Critical Examination of the Accessibility of User-Enacted Moderation Tools on Facebook and X},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
journal = {Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.},
numpages = {38},
}