Facebook’s Accessibility Settings Make The Site Easier For Visually
Impaired Users & Here’s How You Can Help
ByJAMES LOKE HALE
For many of us, accessing our favorite social media sites is as easy as
opening our browser or mobile app. We log in and expect it to simply
work. But for blind and visually impaired users who work with screen
reader software, accessibility is far from simple.
With websites like Facebook, accessibility has to be coded into the back
end. Their content must be able to be interpreted by a screen reader,
which outputs the content either by reading it out loud, or by showing
it on a refreshable Braille display. That's why, when Facebook engineer
Matt King, who is blind, joined Facebook as a user in 2009, the site was
virtually impossible for him to use, he tells Bustle. At the time,
Facebook was becoming more and more visual, and King's screen reader
software could not describe to him posts that were thick with images. So
when Facebook recruited him onto its accessibility team in 2015, he
became one of the people who works every day to make Facebook more
accessible for people with disabilities, including helping to launch a
game-changing photo description system that has now been deployed across
Facebook products.
Without back-end accessibility coding, screen readers often produce
"gobbledygook" for large swathes of websites, King says. Before Facebook
began throwing serious developmental muscle behind accessibility, users
like King would have to deal with their screen readers interpreting
pictures as "photo" or something like "GX_23789ABCD.jpg, because it was
the name of the image that was there," King explains.
Courtesy Matt King, Facebook
But with the system King helped to launch, users with screen readers are
provided with descriptions of photos. At first launch in 2016, the
system was only able to provide phrases like "image may contain two
people outdoors, [...] water," King tells Bustle. "Pretty crude phrase,
but a lot better than 'photo'."
This early model was a big enough step in the right direction that
positive feedback poured in from users, and the team expanded the
capability from Newsfeed to other products like Groups and Files. Now,
the system is available in 25 languages "across most of the products
that Facebook offers," King says.
And Facebook's accessibility team continues to flesh it out. In early
2017, they were able to give the AI the capability to recognize actions,
so the system now recognizes 17 different actions like "walking, eating,
playing musical instrument, onstage, and a few other things like that,"
King explains. So now the phrase "image may contain two people outdoors"
has been upgraded to, "two people standing outdoors," he says.
Most recently, in December 2017, King's team added the ability for users
to hear the names of people who are in photos thanks to facial
recognition. King clarifies that only a user's friends who have facial
recognition turned on in their settings will be detected by the AI, and
says it can be a huge help for people who are visually impaired. "If
you're my friend, please have that facial recognition setting enabled,"
he says.
Part of sighted users improving accessibility for their blind and
visually impaired friends involves understanding that blind and visually
impaired people use computers in the first place — which not all
non-disabled people necessarily understand. King says people often seem
incredulous when he tells them he works with computers. "I started using
a computer as a blind person back in 1985," he says. He used computers
in college, and then as an electrical engineer at IBM, where he says he
became aware of just how simple it was for sighted people to do the same
work that required King to have very specialized knowledge.
Courtesy Matt King, Facebook
"It bothered me that there were so many blind people that I was trying
to help, like peers at IBM, for example," he explains. "I was just
trying to help them do their job better, and they had to learn so much
just to do some of the basics on the computer."
Screen reader software is an essential tool for visually impaired
computer users, but having a screen reader doesn't make up for websites
that don't consider accessibility. On websites where a screen reader
can't pick up on much of the content, particularly visual content, "You
just have no concept of what's in [images], so there's no way to
interact and be part of the conversation," King explains. "It's like
there's this room with glass walls and you're on the outside, and
everyone else is inside having their conversation. You can see the
conversation going on, but you have no idea what they're talking about."
With programs like word processors, screen readers don't have much heavy
lifting to do, but when it comes to websites, if accessibility isn't
done on the back end, using what King calls the "plumbing of
accessibility," then screen readers will be stymied, rendering content
inaccessible to blind and visually impaired users.
Turning on facial recognition is one of the ways Facebook users can help
their blind and visually impaired friends right now. And though King and
his team are continually building up the photo description system, users
can also take a few moments to write their own descriptions in photo
posts. A simple sentence like, "My daughter riding a gray horse in a
field on a sunny day," helps improve visually impaired users' experience.
On the Facebook accessibility team's "roadmap for the future" is adding
the names of celebrities to facial recognition in photos, adding
"concepts" to the photo description system so it will be able to
recognize and describe more things, and potentially offering a
functionality where a user would be able to have a conversation with
Facebook's AI about a photo.
Courtesy Facebook
King says that feature is "a long way from being a product," but it
would involve being able to "ask the picture a question like, 'What
color are the curtains?' Just any arbitrary question, and the system
would try to answer that," he explains.
And when it comes to spreading the word about how accessible technology
works, King says, "Anything that raises the awareness of accessibility,
this whole idea that we can bring the media world to life, getting
everybody to spread awareness of accessibility all at once [...] It
really helps if the general public understands how important equal
access to information and technology is for people with disabilities."
Folks like King work on improving accessibility every day, but it's also
up to non-disabled people to be aware of the challenges created by a
world that is rarely accessible to all.
You are invited to visit the moderator's Web site at WWW.DavidGoldfield.Info
for additional resources and information about assistive technology training
services.
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