Meet the Team That Makes It Possible for the Blind to Use Facebook

[KamaAina]

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/meet-team-makes-possible-blind-use-facebook

Jessie Lorenz can’t see Facebook. But it gives her a better way to see the world—and it gives the world a better way to see her.

Lorenz has been blind since birth, and in some ways, this limits how she interacts with the people around her. “A lot of people are afraid of the blind,” she explains. “When you meet them in person, there are barriers.” But in connecting with many of the same people on Facebook, she can push through these barriers. “Facebook lets me control the narrative and break down some of the stigma and show people who I am,” she says. “It can change hearts and minds. It can make people like me—who are scary—more real and more human.”

She uses Facebook through an iPhone and a tool called Voiceover, which converts text into spoken words. It’s not a perfect arrangement—Facebook photos are typically identified only with the word “photo”—but in letting her read and write on the social network, Voiceover and other tools provide a wonderfully immediate way to interact with people both near and far.

“I can ask other parents about a playdate or a repair man or a babysitter, just like anyone else would,” says Lorenz, the executive director of the Independent Living Resource Center, a non-profit that supports people with disabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Blindness becomes irrelevant in situations like that.”

ILRCSF is our sister agency up in SF. In fact, I just re-friended Jessie; I had unfriended her because I was peeved that she refused to hire me on up there.

[hunter]

1. Years ago, in HTML 3 world, I was working on a decrapifier for web pages...

... to make them more accessible to the blind and other people ordinary browsers don't work for.

But even then I couldn't keep up with all the crap and bling increasingly obscuring actual content.

The advent of smart phones with very limited screen size and css improved the situation for a while, until people started buying cell phones with larger high resolution screens and more powerful processors that could run complex scripts.

Walking through DU's "Greatest Threads" isn't so bad using an audio browser based on Elinks or something similar, but this seems to be one of those problems where web sites will have to agree upon a certain standard for non-visual browser presentation, or else we'll need something approaching artificial intelligence to sort what any one person regards as crappy noise from the content.

As an almost exclusively visual thinking person I can quickly scan through posts in DU forums and groups ignoring topics and subjects that don't interest me and members who simply irritate me. I'm certain blind people and people of other similar abilities could browse just as quickly with alternative tools. The tools they have now are not optimal.

It's wonderful that individual web site owners like facebook are paying attention to the concerns of their non-visual users, but I think we need some sort of replacement for the current html/css/javascript/whatever-the-hell-image-and-video-standards system we have now.

Actual web page content ought to be fully accessible to anyone capable of language, any language: visual, aural, touch, International Morse Code, and everything else.

We ought to be presenting and preserving our wisdom, knowledge, raw information, and even our silliness and gossip, in a format that someone Helen Keller could quickly skim through and understand.