Awesome Text Post* (*not actually awesome)
July 1, 2018 1:33 PM   Subscribe

Since last Saturday, many Facebook status updates can't be read by blind people.

"Some blind people are quick to jump to your defense, claiming that your accessibility team is small and perhaps doesn’t have the power to block releases after accessibility is broken. I’d buy such justifications if you were a mom and pop operation on a shoestring budget. But you’re not. You’re fucking Facebook."

By Tasha Raella on Medium, via Hot Garbage.
posted by Gin and Broadband (37 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wow, that's bad. I knew there was a reason I stick to Twitter, if I have to use any social media at all.

Also, for a sample of the weird alt text descriptions, consider: "image may contain water, grass, sky, people." Thanks a lot.
posted by Alensin at 1:51 PM on July 1, 2018 [7 favorites]


I used to work in accessible tech, and thought I'd kept my hand in a little on the generalities. I only found out about the weird ass "alt-text" and how you change it a few days ago. Honestly, those descriptions are as about of helpful as the misguided people who think alt-text is some sort of seo booster.

And there's no alt-text at all on Instagram.

Do better.
posted by Helga-woo at 2:09 PM on July 1, 2018 [13 favorites]


"Some blind people are quick to jump to your defense, claiming that your accessibility team is small and perhaps doesn’t have the power to block releases after accessibility is broken. I’d buy such justifications if you were a mom and pop operation on a shoestring budget. But you’re not. You’re fucking Facebook. You have billions of dollars at your disposal. If you’re accessibility team is small and underpowered, it’s not because you don’t have the resources to make systemic change. It’s because you believe that shoddy accessibility is enough accessibility."
Very well said. This is inexcusable bullcrap.

I'm writing a letter to Facebook, for whatever good that will do. Maybe if all of us do so, it will get more attention. In FB, click the question mark at the top of the screen > Report a Problem > Something Isn't Working.
posted by bologna on wry at 2:25 PM on July 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


I honestly think 90% of accessibility issues are people just not thinking things through. BLind/disabled people don't enter the sighted mind because we're not visible to them, and if we are, the idea that we can use a computer and live a full life is some kind of radical inspiration porn.

On the other hand, the remaining 10% of issues are things like this, where the system is set up to ignore our needs in the name of… money, or something?
posted by Alensin at 2:33 PM on July 1, 2018 [15 favorites]


The notifications thing is pretty lame, too.

Helga-woo: are you saying alt text is a "yes" or "no" for accessibility? I've been working under the impression that alt and title attributes are good, but I've also never seen it characterized as unusual. Curious to learn!
posted by rhizome at 2:50 PM on July 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


Software is hustled into life by product managers, and all they care about is Minimum Viable Product. What’s the quickest and easiest way I can say I got this out the door in Q3? Oh, it breaks accessibility? Well no one who cares about accessibility is in charge of my metrics and whether or not I can say I launched my shit in Q3.
posted by bleep at 3:13 PM on July 1, 2018 [16 favorites]


“We can put stuff in alt text but the framework doesn’t support it and it’ll take longer for the dev team to figure out how to break the framework and they’re busy just trying to keep the ship afloat” is the way this stuff gets talked about in software companies.
There’s also “We are building this for a set of personas and none of them are blind.” Is another one. I am a UX designer and I hear it every day. It sucks.
posted by bleep at 3:17 PM on July 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


Alt-text is a yes, it's the automatically generated ones that Facebook creates that are not helpful. Well, I suppose they're more helpful than nothing. It should describe the image, that's the point of it. Facebook automatically creates machine-read alt text, which says helpful things like image may contain people, outdoors. I manage a Facebook page for an environmental charity, almost all our pictures are outdoors and contain people. You can edit it yourself, but it's a menu option three items deep and only after the photo's been uploaded. I've not tried to find the setting on a mobile.

Not that long ago I found a useful article that outlined what was helpful in alt-text, being descriptive, but thinking about context and audience too. Someone shared it on twitter when the information about turning on alt-text option in your settings was going viral a few months ago. I wish I could find it again.
posted by Helga-woo at 3:23 PM on July 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


Stores have wheelchair ramps, etc not out of the goodness of the developers’ hearts, but due to laws. Software companies are likely never going to care about social good without external incentive to do so, sad as that is.
posted by mantecol at 3:28 PM on July 1, 2018 [33 favorites]


In most of the shops I've worked with, designing for accessibility is a thing that everyone is aware needs to be done, and people generally do make an effort to go through the compliance checklist of do we have alt text, are we using the right DOM nodes, is the color ratio high enough, etc.... Everything theoretically should work -- but the actual testing of the site with an actual screen reader still happens at the last minute, shunted off to that one isolated QA guy who doesn't talk much, or else nobody gets round to it at all. Screen-readers aren't part of most developer's cross-browser testing set, and they should be.

And even when they're found and reported, accessibility bugs unfortunately tend to get assigned at lower priority than the bugs that affect a greater number of users in absolute terms. Which is bad but soooort of understandable for the scramble of a tiny startup. Totally inexcusable for a company within an order of magnitude of Facebook scale.

Things are a lot better than they used to be. Seriously, especially in the education market, people are starting to pay real attention to 508 compliance; everybody knows they should be doing it, and you never have to argue someone into agreeing that it matters, anymore. Long way to go, though.
posted by ook at 3:30 PM on July 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


If those personas were real people, chances are at least one of them would have sight loss in their lifetime.
posted by Helga-woo at 3:30 PM on July 1, 2018 [7 favorites]


I've pushed (to varying degrees) for accessibility on projects for the majority of my career, and I have never had a project lead say no - - but I've never had a project lead agree to give us the time to develop and test it, either. It ends up being a non-launch-blocking optional requirement, done only because I've had the pleasure of being on/leading tech teams with members who care enough to squeeze it in on nights and weekends.
posted by davejay at 3:40 PM on July 1, 2018 [11 favorites]


I supervise someone with severe vision impairment. Our IT shop communicates heavily using Slack. They used to have an XMPP gateway, and by enabling a Slack to IM Client (Adium) gateway, this was the only way Slack became accessible to this employee.

Then Slack discontinued XMPP support, because "reasons", while their electron-based client and browser client continues to be an accessibility mess. And now we've spent a super long, and I mean stupidly long, period of trying to get something passably working for an accessible Slack.

As mantecol more succinctly said, this is something that should be managed with laws and regulations, not the f-ing free market. Facebook and Slack and all the rest should all be considered only benevolent when they are foced to be. Otherwise they are going to maximize profits at the expense of the margins.
posted by mcstayinskool at 5:19 PM on July 1, 2018 [15 favorites]


My favourite auto-generated alt text bug on Facebook is how it would always announce that photos of hockey games would get described as 'basketball' because it was picking up on the rest of the arena but not what the people on the surface were doing.
posted by Space Coyote at 5:49 PM on July 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


Meanwhile, Twitter has for many years encouraged users to post gifs of text (for length or formatting reasons). Now that their length limits are kind of dealt with, the culture of unnecessary gifs of text that they encouraged persists.
posted by joeyh at 5:50 PM on July 1, 2018 [9 favorites]


The federal government even has good accessibility standards that companies have to comply with if they want to sell to the government. If we had a government anymore we could start to think about expanding that requirement.
posted by bleep at 6:43 PM on July 1, 2018 [5 favorites]


Bleep: Funny you mention that. I'm thinking of trying to get the DHS Trusted Tester certification, which is basically the government-provided way to make sure apps and web sties are 509-compliant. I *just* missed the window for enrollment, and it looks like they're upgrading the coursework and will be accepting new applicants in October.
posted by Alensin at 7:18 PM on July 1, 2018 [3 favorites]


Oops. 508. I have no idea with section 509 is about, but it isn't accessibility.
posted by Alensin at 7:57 PM on July 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


i recently read an article about how one guy at Facebook essentially tricked the whole organization into moving from Python 2.7 to Python 3. he had to quietly edit training materials for new hires, gradually modify their automated testing system without telling anyone, and so on. it was a kind of organizational politics totally unlike what you’d see in a normal company, where presumably you just have to convince upper management and then eventually everybody slowly moves over.

it seemed like a very weird place where nobody will admit they’re in charge. so i’d imagine any top down enforcement of accessibility is unusually ineffective. on the other hand, especially if accessibility testing could be automated, someone could probably just gradually impose it on everyone by changing the testing configuration.
posted by vogon_poet at 9:20 PM on July 1, 2018 [4 favorites]


Stores have wheelchair ramps, etc not out of the goodness of the developers’ hearts, but due to laws.

“Some paper pusher bureaucrat from the capital tells me I have to have a wheelchair ramp along with the three steps at the front door of the shop! But I told him that not once in the last 22 years has someone with a wheelchair even come in here!”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:50 PM on July 1, 2018 [8 favorites]


Found it! Guide to the alt-text field.
posted by Helga-woo at 12:02 AM on July 2, 2018 [5 favorites]


This is pretty dumb. I wasn't aware. I'll be writing about this after I contact Facebook. Accessibility is important, and yes as mantecol notes these companies won't do much more than assuage their own consciences until we force them to or give them an artificial conscience in the form of a good public shaming.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:48 AM on July 2, 2018


The whole coloured background thing, and all the other ways people decide to take text, the simplest, lowest-bandwidth, most flexible kind of information, and render it as images... just why?
posted by Dysk at 2:29 AM on July 2, 2018 [7 favorites]


Here's a Twitter thread by Robot Hugs about writing useful alt-text.
posted by Lexica at 9:52 AM on July 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


In the (useful!) Robot Hugs thread:
There are also a bunch of extensions you can add to your browser to make them visible if you want to get an appreciation for how little people actually do proper alt text across the internet and how good you are for trying!
Does anyone have recommendations for such extensions? I do try to remember to add descriptions to my images on Twitter but find it frustrating that they're invisible to me after posting.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 12:09 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


Another good source for alt text instruction is this WebAim article.
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 12:19 PM on July 2, 2018


The whole coloured background thing, and all the other ways people decide to take text, the simplest, lowest-bandwidth, most flexible kind of information, and render it as images... just why?


I'm not on FB much these days, but I assumed this was an automatic FB thing they imposed on one-sentence posts.
posted by rhizome at 12:31 PM on July 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


Gee. If only there was a set of already-written, exhaustive web standards for accessibility that could be followed by a corporation that has, for all practical purposes, nearly-unlimited financial resources.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:07 PM on July 2, 2018 [10 favorites]


I'm not on FB much these days, but I assumed this was an automatic FB thing they imposed on one-sentence posts.

Nope. Facebook provides it as an option, but not by default. It's a thing that people are actively choosing to do.
posted by Dysk at 3:04 AM on July 3, 2018


No, it's automatic (unless FB is doing another one of its incremental UI rollouts and we're looking at different things, which is possible.) I routinely need to pad the length of my facebook posts in order to shrink the godawful big text back down to normal size. The background images are user-selected, it's white by default, but the big text is automatic.

(But even those are still real, selectable, screen-readable text overlaid on a background image, though. When the text is baked into the image, that's the user uploading a picture of words, not facebook converting their words to images.)
posted by ook at 7:13 AM on July 3, 2018


Big text is automatic. Coloured backgrounds etc are not, and (unless something has changed) that was the bit that turned the thing into an image rather than just a bigger font.
posted by Dysk at 7:17 AM on July 3, 2018


I just tried it, honest, it's still real text even if you set a background image. There'd be no reason for facebook to convert that to images, it'd cost them CPU and bandwidth.
posted by ook at 7:21 AM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]


Huh, you're right, it does the same for me (from a browser on a computer, at least) but there are also a bunch of images of Facebook backgrounded text in my feed. I guess people are either sharing screenshots of text (why in the fuck would you ever even contemplate doing this??) or one of the dozens of different Facebook clients does stuff differently?
posted by Dysk at 7:25 AM on July 3, 2018


Anything's possible, I guess, maybe some client is doing it wrong? I don't know, though, that'd require extra effort just to say FU to the visually impaired, rather than simple inattention or poor QA. My bet would be on shared-a-screenshot; people are used to passing around memes with text baked in, so maybe they figure that's just How It's Done. (Heck, for that matter I'm guilty of posting the occasional screenshot of a tweet on FB, I should get out of that habit or at least supplement them with transcription...)
posted by ook at 7:34 AM on July 3, 2018


I guess people are either sharing screenshots of text (why in the fuck would you ever even contemplate doing this??)

A while back, it started becoming a thing because FB prioritized images over text in people's feeds, then people started making gifs of screenshots of text because FB started to prioritize video over images.

Also, it's becoming a thing on Twitter, as "This dickhead is saying these dickheaded things, but I don't want to retweet / quote-tweet them," or to prevent said dickhead from searching their own name to unleash their minions.
posted by Etrigan at 7:42 AM on July 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


Aaaaaaah, users gaming the algorithm totally makes sense as an explanation, thanks Etrigan. (And yeah, that's exactly why I've done the screenshot-of-tweet thing, too...)
posted by ook at 8:19 AM on July 3, 2018


Hi! I'm the author of the open letter linked in this thread. Facebook has done it again, but even worse this time. Messenger on IOS is basically unusable for us now because it doesn't allow you to edit what you type; no speech input is given when the backspace key is pressed and when you try to navigate word by word using the Voiceover rotor. Facebook is aware of the issue, but they're giving us the brush-off: "We're working on this issue, thanks for your patience blablablabla." If any of you work for Facebook, or know anyone who does, please push them to fix this problem promptly and to implement better QA so that stuff like this stops happening!
posted by tchemel at 4:01 PM on July 14, 2018 [11 favorites]


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