Facebook App Accessibility

Improving Facebook’s Accessibility
for Visually Impaired Users

Uncovering frustrations and suggesting accessibility improvements to Facebook for the blind

OVERVIEW

Facebook, a popular social networking site is an equally important tool for social interaction for users with visual impairments as typical users through their mobile devices. Using built-in assistive screen reading technologies such as VoiceOver (iPhone) or Talkback (Android), they produce much of the same Facebook content, and garner many of the same reactions from their friend groups.

The aim of this study seeks to focus on the usability and personal insights about common Facebook interactions for the visually impaired as opposed to a broad statistical outline of which features and what content was produced.

ROLE & DURATION

UX Researcher | DePaul University

User Research, Observational studies, User Interviews and Usability evaluation

Sept – Nov 2017

3 Team Members

The Problem

Facebook and other Social Networking Sites(SNS) have large amounts of information and structural complexity that can be overwhelming for users who are visually impaired because this user group relies on screen readers to read content and develop their own ad-hoc browsing strategies as SNS are sometimes complicated to navigate

Auto-captioning technologies have been designed and implemented into various social media platforms for the visually impaired to interact with visual images by using AI to interpret the images and add applicable captions automatically.

However, evaluation studies were somewhat discouraging because the programs were far from perfect at captioning images, and the users relied on them and trusted them far more than their accuracy should have warranted

Key Research Questions

Collaborating with two colleagues, we focused our research by asking questions that would lead to suggested improvements of existing assisted technology and/or suggested features that should be added

How do visually impaired people understand and use Facebook on a regular basis?
How do they perceive and use emojis, pokes, comments, like, share, upload and play games on Facebook?
How can Facebook improve accessibility for their mobile application for visually impaired users?

To answer these questions, we decided on conducting observational studies and user interviews

Recruiting Participants

We recruited four participants from local organizations like Chicago Lighthouse in Chicago and the Colorado Center for the blind in Littleton, Colorado that assist people with visual impairments.

All participants were over 18 years of age and were partially to legally blind.

They also used the Facebook mobile application with the help of screen reader VoiceOver(iPhone).

Fig: Participant information including Facebook engagement and length of time using Facebook

User Interviews

For this section, we hoped to gather a sense for how easily the participants interacted with Facebook, as well as understand what features and areas they used on a regular basis. Each observation lasted for 10 minutes and was video recorded. The observation period was followed with a short interview of about 20 minutes each.

We met each of the participants at the offices of the respective organization through which they had been recruited. Three interviews were performed in a café and one in a conference room. The consent form was read out to participants and verbal consent was obtained. The participants were encouraged to demonstrate and perform tasks they usually perform on their smartphones.

The questions covered topics like their frustrations using Facebook mobile, their motivations, and expectations for future improvements. The interviews were audio recorded. Each of these recordings later were transcribed.

Video: One of our participants giving us a walkthrough of how they use Facebook on daily basis using VoiceOver(iPhone)

Data Analysis

We analyzed the data by combining our notes into a common format. Next, individual team members input their observations from the sessions into Miro, an online collaborative platform. As a team, we then reviewed the observations, grouped them together and identified common themes. The same technique was implemented for both the observation and interview transcriptions.

Image: The observations were gathered into individual insights and combined into general topics to create affinity diagram using Miro.

Findings

General attitude towards Facebook accessibility was positive among our participants.

After conducting observations, user interviews and analyzing the gathered data, we were able to identify their successes and pain points

Successes

PainPoints

Implications for Design

We proposed that the most critical feature would be in response to the need for greater image interaction accessibility, and secondly related to navigation including search functionality as well as more accessible and robust change logs.

1. Image Interpretation AI

We propose an upgrade to Facebook’s A.I. application to help tag photos while taking pictures.
For better user experience, one can even enhance connections to outside resources such as Microsoft’s Seeing AI
Assistance with taking and verifying photos before upload would enhance the usability and better the user experience of interacting with the more visually-centered content present on Facebook.

2. Navigation

Even though there has clearly been an effort in this area, the navigation still needs to be considered with screen readers in mind making sure that the flow of information is logical, and the users can both find their way around as well as avoid superfluous information.
Unlike a sighted user who can scan through visual information, users who are blind must touch on each item to understand them, and therefore must navigate much more information as a baseline.
Superfluous information should, therefore, have special heed paid to avoid it. There would be an opportunity here to allow for customizing the navigation or allow for spoken interactions.

3. Search Functionality

The search functionality can be made much more accessible with the implementation of specialized filters so that one can search their friend group, or a specific person’s posts if desired.
Allowing users to be able to find previous posts from friends more easily would be helpful as well, as navigating another person’s page, even after they are located, can be a somewhat daunting task for users with visual impairments.

4. Change Logs

Accessible change logs, especially as changes pertain to accessibility, need to be maintained.
A centralized location to look for assistance must be provided with understanding how changes to the UI will affect the interaction that users with visual impairments will face.

Project Limitations

1. Limited participants

The limitations of this study were primarily due to a small number of participants, making it hard to generalize findings from this research. There will need to be a larger scale follow up to this study to further solidify its findings.

2. Targeted Study with different user groups

The users recruited for this study could be considered passive users, and so this study does not cover user groups who are more active with posting and interacting with a greater range of content already. Further study needs to be done as well exploring other areas of Facebook that current users who are blind do not use due to a perception of inaccessibility, or due to ignorance of its existence.