Accessing Facebook on Your Iphone

2012-09-19-Facebook iPhone

Seminars@Hadley

Accessing Facebook on Your iPhone

Presented by

Amy Salmon

Moderated by

Larry Muffet

September 19, 2012

Larry Muffet

This is Seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffet. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in the curricular affairs department. Today’s seminar topic is accessing Facebook on your iPhone. Your presenter is a familiar one, Amy Salmon. Amy is well known to most of you. She’s been a frequent seminar presenter and serves as an instructor for our FCCE modules here at Hadley. Today Amy is going to discuss using the social networking tool Facebook on the iPhone and iPad. Let me welcome Amy and I’m going to turn the microphone over to her at this time.

Amy Salmon

Thank you, Larry and thank you everyone for joining us today to learn about using Facebook on your iDevice. Facebook is a really powerful social networking tool that I’m sure most of you have heard of if not currently using. But the real power of Facebook is the ability to take it with you and access it when you’re on the go and that’s a little hard to do if your only access is through your computer or through or you PC or your laptop. The beauty of the iPhone and the iPad and the iTouch is that it gives us that ability to take Facebook with us wherever we are and access it from wherever we want to. Whether that be sitting in our recliner in our living room or at the local soccer field watching our kids play soccer.

What we’re going to talk about today is how to access Facebook on your iDevice. I will be using an iPhone 4S for the demonstrations today. Most of what I’m doing today replicates the same on an iPhone 4, an iPhone 3GS, an iPod Touch third and fourth generation and an iPad. The only difference with the iPad is that the Facebook app displays a little differently on the iPad because you have a little more real estate to work with on the screen. So what I’m seeing may not necessarily display exactly the same on the iPad. You might need to look around a little bit more for some of this content. It might be that your controls are on the left panel and content is showing on the right panel of the iPad. So just be aware of that if you’re using this via an iPad.

One of the biggest complaints we here about Facebook is its inaccessibility and I can vouch for some problems with Facebook when accessing it from your computer, whether that be through Internet Explorer, Firefox; using standard Facebook, or the M Mobile Facebook, m.facebook.com. There are some accessibility problems for people accessing Facebook using a screen reader. Probably the biggest one is the inability to text chat through Facebook. You can use AIM, AOL instant messenger and install that on your computer and then tie it through you Facebook using your screen reader with customized scripts but it is not an easy process and most people find it extremely difficult. Also there’s buttons that are not properly labeled on the standard Facebook page that throw screening readers and just some confusion as to what they’re supposed to do with those buttons.

One of the reasons that I love Facebook on my iPhone is that it is really accessible and I can do everything that I can do on my PC plus I can do more. I can actually accessibly text chat in Facebook on my iDevice. Now I use the standard Facebook app that is kind of the native Facebook app for your iDevice. If you don’t have it currently installed on your device you can just go to the app store, type in “Facebook” and it is the Facebook app for iDevices. There are a couple of, what they call, accessible Facebook apps for your iDevice. After doing quite a bit of research through Applevis.com, Mac AccessibilityNetwork and other resources that I’ve been looking at over the last couple of months in preparation for today’s seminar, really the only two that I found that had any merit was focus and Voice book VO and that’s Victor Oscar, VO. With Voice book, VO being the more current app in essence replacing Focus.

The problem that I have with these accessible apps is they provide very limited access to the Facebook features and functionality. With Voice book VO it is a free app for 30 days. It allows you to try it out for 30 days. If you don’t like it you can delete it. If you don’t like it after 30 days you will have to pay $1.99 to keep the app and run permanently on your device. The problem with Voice book VO that I find is that really all it allows you to do is to read your newsfeed or the posts that people are posting to Facebook. It allows you to like the post, comment to the post and it allows you to do a status update. Now if that’s all you want to do with Facebook, if that’s the only function you want to use Facebook for then I strongly recommend you go to the app store, type in “Voice book VO” and then download and install that app on your phone.

I like to do a lot more on Facebook than just read posts and comment on them and update my status. So I use the native Facebook app for iDevices and that is what we are going to be using for today’s seminar. If we have time at the end of the seminar I’m more than happy to show a demonstration of Voice book VO. I do have it on my device and would be more than happy to show it for anyone who is interested. But let’s go ahead and dive right into Facebook.

We’re going to open Facebook. One of the things that I really like about the native Facebook app is that it looks just like Facebook on your computer. So if you’re familiar and comfortable with using Facebook on your computer, when you access it on your iDevice it’s going to be very comfortable for you because a lot of what you are used to using is right there. The first time you load this app you will notice that you need to sign in or log in. I have already logged in for the purposes of today’s seminar but it’s no different than logging in when you’re accessing your Facebook from your computer. You will need to type in your Facebook username and password and then log in. Once you’ve logged in on your iDevice and your Facebook page, you will not have to log in again. Just opening Facebook on your iDevice will put you directly into your Facebook page.

What you get placed in is the main Facebook page which I’m going to start in the upper left corner to give you an idea of what is here. You have a search field and that allows you to search for friends or groups, whatever you would typically use your search field for. This is my Facebook page, Amy Salmon. We have a favorites and this is just a heading, so if you want to use some of the navigation features in your iDevice you can use the web router and navigate by heading here if you want to. That would be using the web router which is turning with your thumb and forefinger and turning until you hear headers and then flicking through the headers. You have your newsfeed which you can tap to go into your newsfeed which is to post to Facebook. Your messages which is your email messages that come in and out of Facebook.

I’m going to pause here for a second because in the conference room you are going to hear a little bit of Jaws in the background. I do apologize for that. You might here a beep every once in a while because the Wi-Fi that I’m using here is throwing a message out every once in a while. I apologize but please just disregard that. It has no bearing on your or your access to this seminar. So we just did messages and that’s your email. Nearby, this is something you probably see a lot on Facebook posts and may or may not know what it is. If you see somebody that says “I just checked in at Chili’s.” or “I just checked in at McDonald’s.” That’s what this is. It’s a way for you to kind of let people know where you are, what you’re doing. It is accessible and we can do it and I will show you how to do it. Events, so you can post events that you are putting on or accept events, so look at events that are coming up including birthdays.

Your friends, so your list of friends that you have in your Facebook account; acquaintances which is just another category for friends, you have your friends. You have your acquaintances. Now we have our apps heading. I’m still on the main Facebook page, just so you know where I’m at. You have your app center. This is where you can look for apps that are through Facebook, like trivia with friends which is by the way fully accessible as a voice over. You can do trivia with friends if you want to and if we have time today I’ll show everyone. You’re always going to get this message that says “Install messenger” on this main Facebook page but once you’ve installed it you don’t need to worry about it. What this does is it allows you to access the text chat feature of Facebook which is the next item, chat. So if you want to chat you would go there.

You can find friends. You can look at your photos. You can look at notes that you may have made through Facebook. You can poke somebody just like you can on Facebook’s regular and then here is your friends heading. You have your close friends, your family. I have Hadley School for the Blind under my friends and Northern Illinois University which is where I graduated from and then you get down into your standard tools—account settings if you need to change an account setting or go in and modify some of your account settings. You can do it there. Your privacy and terms. The help center, and log out. That is the main Facebook page on your iDevice. Now we’re going to go back up to the top of the page and I’m going to just three finger swipe down to get there. I have to do it twice. Again, up in my upper left corner is the search field. Over in the right hand corner is a button labeled “nav bar icon launcher” and that can be a little confusing. That is probably the worst labeled button in this app and it has been noted by AppleVis and hopefully they’re going to fix it.

Before I get into that nav bar icon launcher button I do want to say that today at noon Apple released their new iOS operating system, 6.0. I do encourage you all to upgrade to that operating system. It does have some nice, new accessibility features for voice over. It also has promised to improve the accessibility of Facebook on your iDevice as well as incorporate Facebook into more of your standard usage of your iDevice. So it will be really interesting to see what they’ve done to improve this experience for us as we move forward with that new operating system. So what the nav bar icon launcher button does is it really just throws you into a really quick way for you to read your messages or your posts on your Facebook. So whatever your friends are posting out there today. So let’s go ahead, that’s in the upper right corner. We’re going to double tap to open that. Now interestingly the nav bar icon launcher button is now moved to the upper left corner of your Facebook screen. That will allow you to go back, if you want to, to the main Facebook page that we were just on.

So this nav button icon launcher really is a toggle that allows you to go between reading the post and go back to your main Facebook page, so keep that in mind. We’re going to flick right from that upper left corner nav bar icon launcher and see what’s available. Friends requests, so if you had any friend requests it would say how many you had, one, two, five, ten and it’s a button so double tap would open that and allow you to review any friend requests that you had and decided if you want to accept or decline them. Messages, this would be if you had any emails that came in and wanted to review them. It would say you had one or two emails in this messages area. It is a button, double tap opens it. Notifications, this is a newer feature that came out on Facebook within the last, say, four or five months. Notifications would be status updates that people are posting, the check-ins if people have checked in somewhere. That would be listed under notifications. This button just tells you if you have any notifications and if you do, how many. Double tap will take you directly into the notifications page.

And then you’ve got find friends. It’s actually taking me to “find friends” so we’re going to go back to the nav bar icon launcher which puts us back at our main page and we’re going to go down—actually the first thing that I want to do before we get into our post is we’re going to look at our main page which has our wall on it. Now to get to that you just go to your name, your Facebook page name which if we right flick, is right there, Amy Salmon. I’m going to double tap to open that. I’m on my main page for Amy Salmon. That nav bar icon launcher is up in the left corner now of my screen and if I flick through this page, those buttons are going to appear at the top of all of these pages, your friend requests, messages and notifications. I’m on my Amy Salmon page. Here is my summary of my Facebook profile. That would link you to the Hadley School for the Blind Facebook page, actually. I studied at Northern Illinois University. You can add a current city here. You can add more about yourself here if you want to improve your profile or review more on your profile, have a little more detail about yourself.

Your photos are listed here for your profile. Your friends, how many friends and who they are listed here. Your likes if you like certain music or certain bands or websites or TV shows or movies, you can have all of that listed here under your likes. You can actually look at your activity log here if you want to. You can do your status from here if you want to and we’re going to actually do the status from somewhere else but this is one place you can if you want to update your status. Your photo, you can check in from this page if you want to which would be the check-in feature. If you’re at a restaurant or a store and you want to let people know where you are. Alright and now we’re on to my wall post. So I actually posted a status nine hours ago. There is my wall post that went out as a status update. I can like it. I can comment or I can remove it. Here is a wall post that was posted out there by one of my friends, Donald Long.

I can choose to follow that link and go look at that cause if I want to. The rest of these are just wall posts that are posted on my wall, on my Facebook wall. I’m going to go ahead and we’re going to go back to the main Facebook page by going to the upper left hand corner and tapping the nav. We’re going to go to the next item in the list by right flicking. That’s our heading for favorites and we’re going to go into newsfeed which is really where your posts are going to be. Again, that nav bar icon launcher is appearing in the upper left corner of your app screen. You have a status button here so you can update your status here. We’re just going to go ahead and go down and read some of our posts. James shared a link. There are zero likes and zero comments on his post right now. Here is my status.

Right now these are just appearing as standard posts. If I want to interact with this post and like it, just double tap on it. It puts me into it. I can choose to like it by double tapping on like and if I comment and I double tap here, it automatically puts me in a text edit box and I can type a message here and I’m going to just quickly type something in. Let’s go ahead and look and see what I typed. And then you just go to the post button and double tap. That’s how easy it is to comment or like a post on your Facebook on your iDevice.

If we go back, right now I have one like and two comments. So the comment I just posted is being counted now. If I want to go read all of my comments I can read all of my comments. If I want to see who liked it I can go in and see by just double tapping right here on this message. I want to actually update my status. We’re going to change it. I’m going to double tap on the status button. The way I got to it, I upper left corner, right flick until you get to status button. Upper left corner now is a cancel button. Amy Salmon is the one posting this status and then I go to the text field edit box and I type in my new status. I’m going to type in a status. Let’s take a look at what I typed in. I’m going to go ahead and post it and that’s in the upper right corner. IT puts me back on my newsfeed or posts page and if we flick left, it’s that easy.