Facebook Accessibility

Posted on Apr 11, 2009

A recent blog post by Glenda Watson reported a recent TechCrunch article concerning Facebook’s commitment to providing accessible social networking services to people with disabilities. Which is of course a most noble and necessary pursuit.

Carl Augusto, President of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), describes in a recent blog post the specific challenges to providing accessible social media content, and how efforts with Facebook’s development teams has enabled barrier-free access to the popular website:

Social networking sites present some especially difficult challenges. For instance, images are an important part of the site experience, but it is rare that photos get described. Even while in the middle of reading a page, comments or links can change in ways that are undetectable to the screen reader or fall outside the viewing window of screen-magnification. From our very first interaction, Facebook has been responsive to our feedback and committed to finding solutions to these problems.

Among the improvements to Facebook include help center page dedicated solely to accessibility, a feedback stream to collect and channel feedback, and a number of design changes to improve usability. These are all good things. Ms. Watson, however, feels that people with disabilities other than vision get somewhat shortchanged in discussions about web accessibility. I think she has a very good point:

According to stats from the AFB, 21.2 million Americans have reported experiencing vision loss. Yet, According to the U.S. Department of Labour, more than 50 million Americans with disabilities. And that is only in the United States! Why are more than half of us ignored by the press when reporting on web accessibility initiatives?

Among the design flaws mentioned by Ms. Watson include those that negatively affect people with neurological disorders (such as flashing visuals), a lack of captioning for media content, and hardware inputs that are difficult for people with motor skill deficiencies.

I can add my own experience to this discussion. While conducting research on the use of virtual worlds among people with disabilities, the ratio of blind users to overall subjects interviewed was perhaps less than one to four. While I’m not by any means hoisting my findings as conclusive, I will agree that discussions of accessibility need to elevate beyond those with vision impairments.

3 Comments

  1. Glenda Watson Hyatt
    April 11, 2009

    Well said. Attention given to web accessibility needs to be more inclusive.

  2. Marc Grossman
    May 4, 2009

    Thank you for highlighting the accessibility of Facebook and its efforts to connect with the American Foundation for the Blind. I would like to take this opportunity to express to all of your readers that AFB Consulting, the business arm of AFB, is dedicated to cross-disability accessibility. All of our engagements are designed to meet or exceed established guidelines and best practices to maximize accessibility for all types of users. Our network of highly-skilled experts are committed to the principles of universal design and accessibility to all users regardless of ability.

    I invite everyone to click on our new web site and learn more at http://www.afbconsulting.org.

    Thanks

  3. Liz Neal
    May 5, 2009

    I couldn’t agree more that “screenreader-friendly” is not the sole criterion of accessibility and just wanted to add that in addition to helping our consulting clients follow universal design principles, AFB also “walks the walk” on its own web sites. For example, we include captioning and transcripts for all of our videos, and we also make sure that all of our features are keyboard-accessible, which benefits people with motor disabilities who may have trouble using a mouse.

    Thank you to both you and Glenda for raising awareness of the broader issues: that so many people benefit from accessible design!

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