Communications of the ACM
Navigating Facebook When You Can't See Faces
Credit: IBTimes Co. Ltd.
As its name implies, a lot of Facebook is about faces. Users upload 350 million photos a day, making visual content a big part of the platform's experience. But this presents challenges to visually impaired users, according to a study by Cornell information science researchers, who suggest that the technology used on Facebook and other social media sites should be adapted to improve accessibility.
"There needs to be a discussion to find a sweet spot between people who want new ways of interacting online and the need to make content accessible to everyone," says Gilly Leshed, senior lecturer in information science.
Working with the National Federation for the Blind, the researchers recruited 60 blind people to participate in a survey and telephone interviews about their experiences using Facebook and especially about interacting with visual content. The results are described in "How Blind People Interact with Visual Content on Social Networking Services," which will be presented at CSCW 2016, the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Feb. 27 – March 2 in San Francisco.
The paper is co-authored by Violeta Voykinska, Shiri Azenkot, Shaomei Wu, and Gilly Leshed.
Blind people typically interact with computers using screen readers, software that converts text to speech and reads it aloud. But screen readers cannot interpret visual materials such as photos and videos, and navigation based on visual elements of a page can be difficult: How do you decide which button to click when all the buttons just say "OK"?
Blind users have developed a number of strategies to work around these problems, the researchers found. For the most part they rely on text that the person posting added to the photo. They also glean information from what other people comment, the number of "likes" the photo received, and geo-tags that indicate where the photo was taken. Sometimes they rely on friends and family to interpret visual content or to post their own photos. Although blind users upload fewer photos, they in general receive more feedback on their posts.
Some switch to the "mobile" version of a site (a trimmed-down version for phones and tablets that is less visually complex), but this usually means losing some of the features.
The goal of the study is not to offer specific solutions but to encourage and contribute to a discussion of accessibility issues in social media, the researchers say.
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