I’ve been asked to speak at an upcoming conference on Social Media for Non-Profits, which is one of the niches my company seeks to fill. That’s great, and I’m looking forward to it – but there is a catch. Many of the attendees will be blind and the non-profits they run specialize in helping the blind or visually impaired. Have you ever thought about this? I hadn’t. It had never occurred to me – I took it for granted. But being blind isn’t going to keep you from wanting to connect with others via Facebook, MySpace, or other social networks. But as I started to research the topic, I learned that not all social networking sites make it easy. To begin with, just getting past CAPTCHA to create an account causes difficulties.
Yesterday, Carl Augusto, CEO of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), posted on the Facebook blog regarding Facebook and accessibility. He explains how the visually impaired are accessing social media, and some of the problems. As Augusto is blind himself, he understands the issues quite well:
You may be wondering how people with vision loss use computers or surf the web. The answer is quite simple: People who are blind or visually impaired use a screen magnification program to enlarge fonts in order to optimize the screen for reading, or they use a screen reading program that reads the text aloud. These are quick, efficient and helpful solutions — that is, if the websites and computer programs are properly designed.
The challenge is that not all Web pages are compatible with screen readers and magnifiers. When a website is built without regard to accessible design, screen reading software cannot interpret the information, which prevents the blind person from accessing the site. 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.
Facebook is well known for trying to accommodate the visually impaired and has been working with the AFB for two years now. Some of my contacts have told me that while Facebook always tries to help, each redesign completely screws everything up and they need to start again with accessibility. (Time to start building that into the redesign from the ground up.)
Twitter is a fairly accessible web application, from what I can tell, but Accessible Twitter has made it more so. Accessible Twitter is a web app that adds all sorts of necessary things to Twitter, such as keyboard accessible links, consistent layout and navigation, headings and page titles for screen readers, large text sizes, audio cues for the character limit, clear links to specify reply tweets, and more. You know, things most of us would never think of.
Apply this train of thought to mobile phones, which are increasingly leaning towards touchscreens. I’m sighted and I have trouble with touchscreens. I don’t know if there’s a workaround for an iPhone, but Google is working on the Eyes-Free project for the Android shell, which will make it easier for the visually impaired.
I’m still working on putting together my presentation for the end of the month. I’ll be telling the Social Media story, but I also want to be honest about the level of accessibility out there. If you have any information, tips, or tricks on this topic, I’d love to hear from you.
__
Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net