Facebook iOS App version 252 is rolling out to the app store and should be available for everyone over the next couple of days. This update fixes the VoiceOver crash when scrolling the News Feed. Thank you for your patience.
We have a fix in the works for the Facebook iOS App VoiceOver crash when scrolling the News Feed. Once the new version has been approved and is available in the app store we'll post another update. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue
If everyone has access to opportunities to change the world, the world will change. Join us for our first-ever inclusive & accessible virtual career fair on October 10th and learn how you can use your abilities to impact the world. Learn more: #JoinUs #ConnectToCommunity #AccessAbility
Register for the Access Ability Virtual Career Connection at https://www.careereco.com/Fair/EventDetails…
SHARE with your networks! We’ve rounded up companies looking to #RecruitDisabilityTalent. Ready to have an #inclusivejob? Check out the opportunities and apply to participate in the Virtual Career Connection: www.DisabilityIN.org/RecruitDisabilityTalent
Facebook's mission is to bring the world closer together — and that means everyone. More and more, people are turning to Stories on Facebook and Instagram to share moments from their day. Stories let you post items that expire after a day. You choose which friends' Stories you want to explore. The Stories platform is evolving fast as we learn how people prefer to use it.
The Facebook Accessibility team is dedicated to making Facebook Stories an accessible, fun and meaningful ...experience for everyone. We've already made numerous small improvements to the user interface on web, iOS and Android. For example unlabelled controls now have appropriate labels and several interactive Stickers are now focusable and have labels.
We plan to introduce more substantial improvements in the coming weeks and months. These improvements will be informed by design sessions with folks in the community. We will post updates on this page.
Many of you have been wondering what happened to the streamlined News Feed reading features we talked about rolling out for Android users earlier in the year. Our initial plan was for the Android experience to mirror the iOS experience where you can move to the next or previous post in News Feed with a single swipe instead of having to swipe 8 or more times through all the elements of a post.
As described in our previous post on this topic, we experimented with the single-swi...
आगे पढेंAutomatic Alt Text and Custom Alt Text are now available for Instagram users.
The bug in Messenger affecting VoiceOver is now fixed and should go out in the next update (version 175) pending Apple’s sign off. This may take some time to reach all devices. Thank you for your patience as this rolls out to everyone and apologies for the inconvenience.
Last week we became aware of a bug in our iOS app that affected how VoiceOver announces text posts containing a background image or color. VoiceOver announced these posts as “awesome-text-background.” The bug has been fixed, and we're investigating what caused it. We sincerely apologize to our community and thank those who followed up with us about this issue.
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day — an annual day to get people thinking and learning about how technology can help people with have a disability feel included, share their lives with family and friends and access information just like everyone else does. Below you can find an interview with Facebook Accessibility Specialist Matt King sharing more about why it's so important to raise awareness about accessibility.
In honor of the day, we're releasing new survey res...ults from Facebook users in 50 countries that found more than 30% of people reported difficulty in at least one of these areas: seeing, hearing, speaking, organizing thoughts, walking, or grasping with their hands.
At Facebook, we're always looking to better understand how people with disabilities use the platform so that we can build products that help reduce barriers and make it possible for them to connect with friends and loved ones and access information.
Open position, Software Engineer, Mobile iOS Accessibility
Apply online: https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LCHajUAH/
Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Through our family of apps and services, we're building a different kind of company that connects billions of people around the world, gives them ways to share what matters most to them, and helps bring people closer together. Whether we're creat...ing new products or helping a small business expand its reach, people at Facebook are builders at heart. Our global teams are constantly iterating, solving problems, and working together to empower people around the world to build community and connect in meaningful ways. Together, we can help people build stronger communities — we're just getting started.
Facebook is seeking a Mobile iOS Accessibility Engineer to focus on the accessibility of Facebook’s various product offerings. This person would work on the Accessibility Engineering team to improve accessibility infrastructure and compatibility of Facebook’s products with assistive technologies. This position is based in our Menlo Park headquarters. We are looking for passionate, empathetic engineers with strong experience developing sophisticated applications on the iPhone or iPad using the iOS SDK. The Accessibility Engineering team is dedicated to improving digital accessibility so that everyone has the power to build community and bring the world closer together. If this is your passion as well, then we look forward to hearing from you soon!
When you open your Facebook News Feed to learn what's happening with friends, family, and in your favorite groups, we want your experience to be delightful. It should be simple and easy; it should not feel like a lot of work to skim through the stories and interact with the ones you find most meaningful.
So one customization we made some time ago on iOS for VoiceOver users is streamlined feed navigation. Each time you swipe right to tell VoiceOver to read the next item, Voice...Over reads the most important elements of the next story in the feed. Even though each story contains many items that VoiceOver could individually focus, it takes just one swipe to hear the next story. If you want to explore all the elements in a story and use the buttons and links inside of it, you can double tap the story to open a screen where VoiceOver can focus each of the elements it contains. We call this customization of the VoiceOver feed reading experience "single-swipe feed navigation."
Recently, we started rolling out single-swipe feed navigation in the Android News Feed. So, if you are using an Android screen reader, instead of eight or more swipes to get to the next story in the News Feed, it will take only one. And, like on iOS, Android screen reader users can double tap to get to a fully expanded version of a story.
If you want to comment, like, love, or otherwise react, those actions are also just one gesture away. Android screen reader users can double tap and hold to pop up a menu of actions for the currently focused story. In iOS, simply swiping down when actions are the current rotor setting, which is the default, scrolls through the available actions. For example, swipe down once to scroll to "Like" and then double tap to like it.
Single-swipe feed navigation is rolling out gradually on Android. When you get it, let us know what you think.
Today we're announcing new face recognition tools that will help people who are visually impaired know more about who's in the photos they encounter on Facebook. Now, people who use screen readers will know who appears in photos in their News Feed even if people aren't tagged.
Two years ago, we launched an automatic alt-text tool, which describes photos to people with vision loss. Face Recognition is another way we're using artificial intelligence to make it easier for all people, regardless of ability, to access Facebook, make connections and have more opportunities.
Check out the demo to learn how the tool works.
Spotlight on Rafi Romero (Recruiting Products Engineer)
What do you do at Facebook?
I am an engineer on Recruiting Products and based out of the New York office. I work on building tools for recruiters so that they can more efficiently do their jobs. For example, we automate day-to-day tasks that help them, whether they're scheduling meetings or finding possible candidates.
...I'm also co-lead of the Differently Abled, an Employee Resource Group for people with disabilities. Any employee can join and our membership includes folks who have disabilities or have loved ones with disabilities.
How did you get involved with accessibility at Facebook and what have you been working on?
Because of my involvement with Differently Abled, one of my managers suggested that the engineering point of contact for accessibility on Recruiting Products would be a good fit for me. I thought it made perfect sense, allowing me to find overlap between my day job (coding) and what I do as co-lead of Differently Abled. One thing I like about this role is it has opened my mind and taught me a lot about people with varying physical abilities whereas at Differently Abled, I've been able to explore my passion for mental health.
This role has involved both prioritizing accessibility work and fixing bugs. For instance, earlier this year our Recruiting Products org had its semiannual “bug bash”, when all the engineers meet to address technical debt and one of the themes was accessibility. We needed a quantifiable goal, so we focused on specific locations in our code that have been marked as inaccessible and solved about half of the outstanding issues in this single moment.
What is one piece of advice you would give other developers on accessibility?
Learn to use a screen reader. It's a big wake-up call because suddenly you realize there's a whole other microcosm of the human experience that you might not have been aware of. VoiceOver offers a pretty good tutorial for Mac Users.
What do you do in your free time?
I spend a lot of my free time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I live half a mile away and try to go every weekend to experience the latest exhibits, where I particularly enjoy European paintings, Islamic art, and anything from the Eastern Mediterranean.
I also like playing video games (yes, I still play Pokemon Go and I've recently been hooked on the new Zelda game).
After being paralyzed due to a rare neurological condition, Marisa Hamamoto used Facebook to connect with her community and explore her mission of making dance accessible to everyone. Together they built Infinite Flow, the first wheelchair ballroom dance company, dedicated to inclusion in performing arts as well as in everyday life.
For Marisa Hamamoto, dance is everything. Previously paralyzed due to a rare neurological condition, she miraculously regained her ability to walk, but made it ...her mission to make dance accessible to all. And after a powerful Messenger conversation, Infinite Flow - A Wheelchair Dance Company was born.
और देखेंWe're honored to share that Matt King, an Accessibility Specialist at Facebook, spoke at TEDMED about the importance of improving equity for people with disabilities, especially when it comes to technology. He joined a community of change-makers who are all passionate about making the world a healthier place and removing barriers imposed by disability.
Born with Retinitis Pigmentosa, a degenerative genetic disease that left him blind, Matt discussed how vital his connections ...are with others in the blind community. He highlighted opportunities and challenges that technology presents for people who have disabilities and how his journey to make technology more accessible led him to join Facebook where he's pushing boundaries in software accessibility for people with disabilities.
His hope is that through community and technology, we can create change that makes our society more inclusive to all people, regardless of their abilities. Matt’s talk will be available on http://bit.ly/2zKiYCe sometime during 2018.
Photo by: TEDMED and Jerod Harris
We're excited to announce a new feature designed to improve navigation for people who use a screen reader or keyboard shortcuts on Facebook! From any page on www.facebook.com, pressing 'Alt + /' will activate our new Navigation Assistant. From the Navigation Assistant, you can jump to sections of the current page, other pages on Facebook or Accessibility resources. We hope that this will make navigating Facebook simpler and more predictable! http://bit.ly/2yzD1UR
Tracy McGee Boyd used the power of community on Facebook to create a place for other moms like her. By sharing their stories and offering each other support, Mommies with Guides has become a group of women who empower each other through the shared experience of having a guide dog. http://bit.ly/2yvdQmE
Tracy McGee Boyd is a mother of four from Portland. She's also legally blind. Having never met another blind mom, she decided to create her own support community by starting Mommies with Guides
We're excited to announce that Facebook now supports custom captions in videos on iOS! Another feature we added is scaling the caption size with the video player size, as the built-in video player does. So now, a video in landscape will display captions in a slightly bigger font size than a video in portrait. The settings are nested a few levels in so you'll need to: Open Settings > General > Accessibility > Subtitles & Captioning. http://bit.ly/2xPvuim
