Bias on the web and beyond: an accessibility point of view

The Web is the most powerful communication medium and the largest public data repository that humankind has created. Its content ranges from great reference sources such as Wikipedia to ugly fake news. Indeed, social (digital) media is just an amplifying mirror of ourselves, good or bad. Indeed, as all people has their own cultural and cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias, see Figure 1), web content as well as our web interactions are tainted with them. Data bias includes redundancy and spam, while interaction bias includes activity and presentation/exposure bias. In addition, sometimes algorithms add bias, particularly in the context of search and recommendation systems. As bias generates bias, we stress the importance of debiasing data as well as using the context and other techniques such as explore & exploit, to break filter bubbles.

Our main goal is to make people aware of the different biases that affect all of us on the Web as well as stress that we should design inclusive content such that we help people with learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia) or vision problems (e.g., daltonism), among others. This makes the Web more accessible for all people. Finally, we have to remark that awareness is the first step to be able to fight and reduce the vicious cycle of web bias. For more details see my article on this topic [1].