Herdict

Have you ever come across a Web site that you cannot access and wondered, "Am I the only one?" Herdict Web aggregates reports of inaccessible sites, allowing users to compare data to see if inaccessibility is a shared problem.

'Herdict' is a portmanteau of 'herd' and 'verdict,' because the website voices the verdict of its users (the herd) on a website's accessibility. If a Herdict user comes across a website that they cannot access, they can easily file a report and check their experience against that of other users' to see if the inaccessibility is a technical error or the product of censorship.

Herdict is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Begun by Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Herdict Web is a natural progression from Berkman's OpenNet initiative, which views Internet filtering through an academic lens. Though both projects identify and document internet filtering and surveillance in order to promote and inform wider public dialogues about such practices, only Herdict has the potential for truly comprehensive results due to its crowdsourced reports.

Across the world, private institutions and governments infringe upon citizen's rights by limiting access to aspects of the internet. Herdict Web seeks to create a real-time picture of Internet inaccessibility in order to better inform global internet users of what's being kept from them.

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