2012-04-24-Facebook Part 1
Seminars@Hadley
Networking with Facebook Part 1
Presented by
Amy Salmon
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
April 24, 2012
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of the seminars team her at Hadley and I also work at curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is networking with Facebook and it’s networking with Facebook Part I. Your presenter is a familiar one to those of you who have listened to seminars at Hadley before or are a Hadley student because our presenter is Amy Salmon.
Amy has a master’s of science in rehabilitation teaching of blind adults with an emphasis on access technology. Since 2002 she’s run a business providing computer software and website accessibility and usability consulting services. She’s got a really impressive client list including Marriott, Motorola and Amtrak and since 2006 she’s been a Hadley instructor. She specializes in teaching both access technology and for the Forsyth Center for Entrepreneurship.
Today we’re going to exam a very popular social networking tool which also has some value for those of you looking to promote yourself and your business and that of course is Facebook. Now let me welcome Amy and turn the microphone over to her.
Amy Salmon
Thank you, Larry. We’re here today to learn about Facebook. In today’s seminar we’re going to cover several things. We’re going to learn what is Facebook, the accessibility challenges of Facebook, how to access Facebook on your computer and your mobile device, how to create your Facebook profile, how to navigate your Facebook homepage, how to create and edit your profile, how to add or change your profile picture, how to add, find and manage your friends and how to view and interact with Facebook posts including how to post your status.
That’s what we’re going to try to get through today. What we don’t get through today we’ll follow up with next week in Part II of the seminar. The first thing we’re going to talk about is what is Facebook. Facebook is a social networking application. It allows you to create a personal profile to communicate with friends, family and business associates. It allows members to participate in interest groups, play games, follow friends and generally just stay in touch with the people that you want to stay in touch with. Facebook is the most popular social networking tool out there today with over 800 million Facebook pages or Facebook profiles out there right now.
Facebook is all about interaction. People use it to communicate with each other, with their families, with friends, with coworkers, you can read messages from one another, and you can share photos. It’s an important method of sharing information. Businesses use Facebook today to build a community of people, to promote their business to that community of people. For example a business might have a Facebook page and create something where they offer a promotion where if you get the most amount of “likes” coming in from you that you may win a prize.
Facebook is a great support for people with visual impairments. A lot of people may disagree with me, they may say Facebook isn’t accessible and I disagree with that. I’ve been using Facebook for about three years now. One of the things I like about Facebook as a user is it’s a great way for me to stay in touch with my family who is all over the country and some are even in other countries. It’s a great way for me to keep track of what is happening with key groups. I have a seven year old daughter who is active in dance and competitive dance. I’m actually friends with her dance company so I get posts about what’s happening, what’s coming up, what their schedule is for the upcoming competitions right to my Facebook.
It also opens up the door for you as somebody who is visually impaired to start reaching out to other groups of people in Facebook who are also visually impaired as an additional online support group. The following are some of the most common features of Facebook and you’re going to hear a lot of this as I’m going through the seminar. Profile; your profile contains your personal information that you want to share with people on your Facebook page. Friend search is a way for you to identify, locate friends and ask them to add you to their Facebook or you can add them to your Facebook. Timeline is a fairly new feature that I’m going to talk about in a minute. The wall is a way to update your status, share photos—the most common use for the wall is to post status updates and photos or links for all your friends or Facebook contacts to be able to see.
Newsfeed; you’re going to hear this and a lot of people don’t know what the heck newsfeed is and when you go on Facebook you see it there. Newsfeed is just a way of tracking any Facebook posts from friends or contacts that you are currently friended with on Facebook. Also, it lists any posts of pages or community groups that you follow. Poke and message features of Facebook; a poke is a way that you can touch somebody on your Facebook page or Facebook friend. A message is just that, it’s an email message that you’re actually sending through Facebook. You have real live chat capabilities through Facebook. That is accessible believe it or not.
Now I do want to touch on some of the Facebook accessibility issues because they are out there. Prior to 2008 Facebook had a lot of accessibility problems. They partnered with the American Foundation for the Blind to try to fix some of these accessibility issues and they did come quite a ways. There is still some accessibility problems that you’re going to run into with Facebook. First and foremost when you are signing up for your Facebook profile, your first time signup for Facebook you are going to encounter a CAPTCHA and the CAPTCHA is there to make sure that this is actually a human being signing up for a Facebook page and not a computer generated request.
I went in this weekend and setup a new account with Facebook for myself to see about it. I was able to hear, they do have an audio link for the CAPTCHA and we’ll go through that when I get to the profile, setting up your profile. It was okay. I was able to hear and understand it. Some people may have a problem with that. If you do have a problem with the CAPTCHA you can actually call Facebook and talk to their technical support and they’ll actually give you the CAPTCHA over the phone so you can type it in yourself if you don’t have somebody who can actually come to the computer and read it to you. It is visible on the screen for sighted people and the audio link is there for non visual users.
There is difficulty with keyboard navigation and missing button labels and alternative text. Videos directly uploaded to Facebook do not support closed captioning and it’s recommended that if you’re actually going to put a video up on your Facebook that you put it up in YouTube using the closed captioning feature in YouTube and then link to it from Facebook. You’re going to hear a lot of people say “Well, if you’re visually impaired you need to use the mobile Facebook site.” I don’t agree with that theory. I use both. I actually use the standard Facebook which is This is the mobile Facebook page that I pulled up right now and it’s M.Facebook.com if you want to go to the mobile Facebook site.
What the mobile Facebook site does is it offers everything in easy to understand links. However you have no page navigation on the mobile Facebook site. You also don’t get as much functionality on the mobile Facebook page that you get on the regular Facebook. Again those web addresses for the standard Facebook is and for mobile Facebook it’s M.facebook.com. The mobile Facebook just provides general profile editing, messaging, wall post updating and friend searching. You don’t get the chat feature on the mobile. You can’t post photos through the mobile site. I’ll be honest I’ve gone to both at the same time where I’ve looked at my Facebook page on the mobile as well as on the standard and some of the messages or newsfeed that I see on my standard are not even showing up on the mobile. So I’m actually missing some of them.
There are Facebook apps for the iDevices—your iPhone, your iPad, your iPod Touch. I went ahead and I looked, I did a lot of research and preparation for today’s seminar on what is considered the most accessible Facebook for your iDevice and the general consensus from Applevis.co, which is the website for iDevice uses is to just use the standard Facebook app that comes on your device. That actually is going to provide you the most functionality as well as fairly good access. There is a few buttons that aren’t labeled. If you want to go ahead and read about these reviews of the different iDevice Facebook apps please go to and that’s A-P-P-L-E-V as in Victor I-S as in Sierra .com.
Facebook standard webpage, so the does incorporate keyboard shortcuts. If you are in the conference room right now you can actually press “F6” to go to the lower browser window of the conference room and I have posted a resource document for you for today’s seminar that lists the addresses for Facebook and mobile Facebook. It also lists a link for applevis.com but at the bottom it lists all the keyboard commands for Facebook. From it I find values quite frequently is the Alt+1 if you’re using it through Internet Explorer to go to my homepage, Alt+2 goes to your profile and then Alt+3 goes to your friends. You do need to be aware though that the keyboard commands or shortcuts for Facebook change depending on what browser you’re using. If you’re using Internet Explorer it’s the Alt key plus the number. If you’re using Firefox it’s Alt plus shift plus the number. And if you’re using a Mac with Safari or Firefox it’s going to be control plus the number.
In the main Facebook page which I’m going to show you right now, we’re at the “Welcome to Facebook.” This is the page you come to when you want to create your Facebook account. If you already have an account you can quickly navigate down and sign in using your email and your password. I’m going to go the log in button. We’ll go through the [area] that’s available once you’re on your Facebook page. For Facebook accessibility and contact information please check out that resource document that I posted which will also be posted with the archive of today’s seminar. Facebook has an accessibility team that they’ve created to continue to work on making Facebook more accessible for screen reader users and the link for them is in that resource document. It’s a fairly lengthy link so I don’t want to read it off here. I also listed a couple of other accessibility resources in that document and in that document you’re going to find about four or five different resources for additional Facebook training if you want to pursue more after we’re done.
We’re going to go ahead and create our Facebook. I’m going to come back into the room because I want to see if anyone has questions before I get into this process.
Caller
How do I find your post again to navigate through Facebook? Did you say “F6?”
Amy Salmon
No, to go down to the resource document which is listed in the conference room, to go to the lower browser window press the F6 key, then press the tab key until you get to the length for the resource document, press your applications key or shift F10 to open the context menu and then down arrow to “save target as” and press “enter.”
Caller
I have one question. How on earth are people that are visually impaired or totally blind like myself supposed to share photos with other people?
Amy Salmon
You can actually post photos if you want, if you know what the photo is of, if you’ve labeled it well when it’s been transferred to your computer or your device. I actually post photos of my kids on my Facebook personal page quite frequently and when I transfer the file from the camera to the computer or if I’ve taken the photo on my iDevice I actually make sure that to label it with an understandable caption or file name so that when I go to post it into Facebook I can actually add a caption to it for better understanding.
David
In Facebook the buttons that are unlabeled are we able to label them with Jaws?
Amy Salmon
I’m sorry. I didn’t understand you, David.
David
In Facebook when we’re using Jaws, the buttons that are not labeled can we label them with Jaws, with the graphic labeler?
Amy Salmon
By all means you can and that is something you are more than welcome to do. I actually did that on my personal Facebook page, I labeled the buttons. However one of the downsides of Facebook is that they’re constantly changing the look of their user interface and so you may go ahead and take all the time to label all of these buttons only to find out in a month that those buttons are either no longer there or they’ve changed to something else. Really your best bet is to get a handle on what it is you want to do on Facebook and getting familiar with how to get to it. I do flip between the Facebook mobile site and the Facebook standard site depending on the task that I’m doing for accessibility reasons.
Larry Muffett
Amy, we had a question in the text box. Is there any difference in using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox when you’re using Facebook?
Caller
I have a question but I was waiting for the answer to that. I’m just a beginner at all this. Would you recommend [Dresner’s] book on Facebook, LinkedIn and all those others? I know she has a chapter on Facebook and there was a seminar about this sometime back. Also that gentleman in Britain, I think [Mr. Bleeks] has some tutorials, would you recommend those for people like me who are just getting started?
Amy Salmon
An answer to the last question; I am familiar with Mr. Bleak’s Facebook. The only concern I have is that he hasn’t updated it recently so the new Facebook interface isn’t covered in his training. Additionally I hope that when you walk away from today and next week’s seminar that you will be able to use Facebook. That’s my goal is to get you from where you are to being able to use Facebook. And I’m sorry, Larry, I completely forgot the question you threw at me.
Caller
[Inaudible question].
Larry
Hi Amy, the question was is there any difference when you’re using Facebook if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser or Mozilla Firefox?
Amy Salmon
Thanks Larry. No there really isn’t. You’re not going to experience that many differences between the browsers. The only real difference is those keyboard commands for Facebook. If you’re using Firefox you need to do Alt shift. If you’re using Internet Explorer it’s just pressing the Alt key. Regarding the file, if you can’t get to the file in today’s seminar please feel free to visit the Hadley website at Hadley.edu on the home page select the link for “access past seminars.” This seminar as well as the handout should be posted within 24 to 48 hours. Don’t lose time today trying to get that document because I want to move forward.
We’re going to go ahead and move forward to creating your Facebook profile and account.
Caller
Amy, I had a quick question. Did you take a poll before and if so tell me how to respond to the poll?
Caller
Hello, this is [Tishim]. I am asking about (Inaudible) – is it familiar with Facebook?
Amy Salmon
I didn’t understand the last question and Larry, I think the poll question was “do you currently use Facebook?” and it was a yes or no. As poll questions come up you will be prompted to answer yes or no. if you’re using a screenreader you can press Alt Y for yes, Alt N for no.
Larry Muffett
That’s correct, Amy. That was the previous poll question. There will only be one more before we finish up today. I know that sometimes it disturbs things. I’m holding those to a minimum but they do provide some very good information for us.
Caller
Hi, I am asking about MVDA does it familiar with Facebook?
Amy Salmon
Yes, actually MVDA works very well with Facebook because it is an internet based web 2.0 application. You should have very few problems with MVDA using Facebook. Alright, we’re going to go ahead and move on to “How do I create my account in Facebook?”
What you want to do is go to that standard Facebook website at and I’m going to take us over there with Jaws. Okay, on this page it’s actually just after the log in if you already have a Facebook account. There is a table down here and then that table is asking you to basically fill out some basic information. I’m going to move through the table fields just to give you some familiarity with what’s there. I’m going to fill in the fields so that you can see the next page. We’re going to use my daughter as somebody to sign up for a Facebook account.