Equal access for all,
Facebook’s strides on disabilities
Matt King, a software engineer who has been blind since college, came to Facebook last summer with a mission: to make websites and mobile apps friendlier for people with disabilities like him.
King, 50, uses screen-reader software that turns webpages and documents into synthesized speech. The challenge he confronts every day: As many as half of websites are nearly impossible for him to browse.
“There are not many products out there where you can say — actually it’s hard to name any — that the experience of using them as a person with a disability is as good as it would be if you didn’t have a disability,” says King. He is part of a team at Facebook that focuses on accessibility, such as providing closed captions for videos and keyboard shortcuts for people who can’t use a computer mouse.
Accessibility is a major problem that looms larger as the world’s population grows and ages and as more of everyday life — applying for college or jobs, making a major purchase, getting health information — happens online.
Increasingly, tech giants from Microsoft to Yahoo are focusing on making technology more accessible to everyone. A major push is underway to add accessibility curriculum to computer science programs and to educate software developers on how to build sites and apps that don’t shut out people with disabilities, whether they use screen readers, mouth-controlled joysticks, closed captioning or eye-tracking technology.
“There is certainly more of an interest in just the last five years from these big companies in Silicon Valley,” said Geoff Freed, director of technology projects and Web media standards for the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media.
It’s also a hot topic at the 31st annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference being held in San Diego this week.
Facebook is re-engineering its website and mobile apps, and it’s brainstorming a new generation of futuristic products that harness the power of artificial intelli- gence to improve the experience of Facebook for people with disabilities.
The first is an automated captioning tool launching in April that will help the visually impaired “see” a photo on Facebook by describing what’s in it.
The ever-quickening torrent of photographs and videos flooding Facebook presents a big challenge for the visually impaired. King says he gleans clues from the captions and comments, but “you really feel excluded when you can’t see the picture.”
Even small bits of information can be helpful, King says. When a friend uploads a profile picture without a caption, the tool tells him there is a person smiling in the photo. When a friend uploads a photo from her phone, it says: “Image may contain: two people, one toddler, smiling, outdoors.”
“These are our very first baby steps,” he says. In time, Facebook hopes to provide a much fuller automated description of photographs and then videos. “It’s really the idea that we are including everybody in the conversation,” he says.
Tech companies aren’t focusing on inclusive access simply out of altruism. Dependent on growth, they can’t afford to overlook large swaths of the population. In the United States, one in five adults have a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 15% of the world’s population, an estimated 1 billion people, have disabilities.
Steps from his desk in Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters is an “empathy lab,” a row of devices that browse the social network using keyboard shortcuts, Braille or the sound of a human voice. The devices are strategically placed along a busy walkway to remind engineers to build — or, in Facebook-speak, hack — accessibility into all products.
That is King ’s life work. He was born with retinitis pigmentosa and considered legally blind, though as a child he was able to ride a bike and hold down a route delivering newspapers. While studying electrical engineering and music at the University of Notre Dame, King lost his sight completely but never his drive. He began tinkering with screen readers to improve the technology. At IBM, he championed equal access for people with disabilities.
King was recruited from IBM by Jeff Wieland, who started Facebook’s accessibility team five years ago. King, who navigates the sprawling campus with a white cane, says he was taken with Facebook’s mission to connect every person on the planet.
“I don’t think there is any other company in the world where accessibility is that core to the mission, where it’s impossible to accomplish the mission without making accessibility great,” he says.
Accessibility is a major problem that looms larger as the world’s population grows and ages and as more of everyday life — such as getting health information — happens online.