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Facebook excludes disabled users
Facebook is excluding users with poor vision and reading difficulties from its social network, through recent changes to its accessibility options, according to usability and accessibility specialist Foviance. The online community has removed an accessibility feature that enabled people to verify themselves by mobile phone, instead of by visual CAPTCHA, and replaced it with an audio CAPTCHA that is not visible or keyboard accessible. The move is likely to prevent many disabled communities from accessing Facebook. Visual CAPTCHAs are graphics with distorted or obscured letters or numbers used to determine if a user is human, to prevent spam and automated postings to blogs and communities etc. They cause significant problems for people who are blind, visually impaired or dyslexic. Lis Angle, accessibility consultant at Foviance, comments: "Social networking websites like Facebook offer huge opportunities for people with disabilities to make friends and network, where it would otherwise be quite tricky. By removing suitable workarounds to their CAPTCHA images, and making links to other accessible options invisible and unobtainable, Facebook is preventing many new users with poor vision and reading difficulties from joining in the fun." Key facts: - The audio CAPTCHA is a poor replacement to mobile phone verification, for a number of reasons: - What if you don't have a sound card? - What if you are deaf-blind, or using a refreshable Braille display? - What if you don't have the required sound plug-in? - The distortion of sound makes the characters more difficult to understand, and if you are blind you have to remember what all the characters are. Furthermore, Facebook has hidden the 'Try an audio captcha' link from the display with negative positioning, and some users (anyone not using a screen reader) will not know that it even exists. This is bad news for people with low vision and reading difficulties who would benefit from an accessible alternative. To make matters even worse, Facebook has given the link a negative tabindex number - this means that the link can never gain focus when a user is navigating using the tab key. It can only be activated if a user is navigating with the cursor keys. A sighted user who relies on keyboard-only navigation is unlikely to use the cursor keys to reach a link, and you can't rely on screen reader users to use this method of navigation either. The 'Try another' link has also been given a negative tabindex number. Facebook should offer as many options as possible - visual and audio CAPTCHAs along with mobile phone verification. The links should be clearly visible to ALL users, regardless of the method a user has chosen to navigate. They should also provide a clearly visible email link or telephone number to customer services for anyone who is having difficulty - this should be positioned near the CAPTCHA image. www.foviance.com
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