September 3, 2009

Herdict: What is and isn't accessible

A while back Tom Crampton wrote about a website that tests accessibility of other web sites. The site, Herdict harnesses the reporting power of the entire Internet to see what sites are being blocked in what countries.

To no ones' surprise, I am sure, China and Iran lead the way.

For example, in the past week FACEBOOK received eight inaccessible reports. Five were from China.

YouTube had 15 inaccessible reports
. Here China led with three of the reports, followed by Indonesia and the United States (2 each), Egypt, France, Israel, India, Morocco, Malaysia, Portugal and Tuvalu with one each.

Granted some of those reports may have been because of network glitches. But the overall pattern is that China leads the way with the most sites made inaccessible to Internet users.

If you are a traveler, you should think seriously about joining the Herdict herd. I regularly send in reports from Brazil (a very open place).

The more we know about how and where information is being denied, the more we can report on it. Download the browser add-in here.

1 comment:

Jillian said...

Thanks for posting about Herdict! The more people who report to Herdict, the more accurate the data becomes.

Thanks again,
Jillian (Herdict staff)