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Making up with Facebook
Transcript
9 February 2014
Roberta: The world’s most popular social media website turns 10 this week, and to mark the occasion we have a guest with us. Andrew Devenish-Meares is a former radio presenter, tandem cyclist and screen reader user, and he’s here to share his experience of reconciling with Facebook. Welcome Andrew.
Andrew: Hi, thanks for having me.
Roberta: Now at one point you gave up on Facebook. What made you give it another go?
Andrew: Oh, I gave up initially because the interface had changed and was really inaccessible, so I really couldn’t get much out of it. I had heard from a number of sources that the Facebook had now got an accessibility team and they’d been working on fixes, so that was sort of encouraging. I had a few friends who were trying to organise stuff and wanted to do so via Facebook, so eventually I caved and gave it another shot.
Roberta: So what were the main differences this time around?
Andrew: The whole interface is a whole lot less verbose will all those, yeah, sometimes you get those meaningless strings of letters and numbers around images and things like that, so all that sort of stuff seems to be gone. And it’s laid out in a little bit more sensible place, a sensible way, particularly if you’re, at least using a screen reader. I don’t know really whether it looks visually that much different, but certainly from the perspective of someone who can’t see and is relying on the audio, it’s a lot easier to get around.
Roberta: And were there any other problems that you encountered Andrew?
Andrew: Yeah, there were a few bits going on that I don’t quite get at the moment, particularly with the iOS app on my iPhone for example, there are a few things I can’t interact with. I can’t quite figure out how to use live chat yet, and there’s still some issues but it’s a lot more usable than it used to be.
Roberta: What do you think are the real benefits of being on Facebook?
Andrew: Being able to communicate easily with friends, I guess, is probably the real benefit, being able to organise what your plans are in some instances, or just letting family and friends know what’s going on in your life and being able to catch up and follow along with what your friends, who you mightn’t see physically very often are doing.
Roberta: Yeah, some people who are listening to this may not understand that, I mean if you want to contact friends by phone you have to ring them all singularly…
Andrew: Yeah.
Roberta: …whereas this way they can all get the same story really, can’t they?
Andrew: Exactly, so you can write it up once and those who are interested can read it.
Roberta: Now Andrew, you’re on Twitter too…
Andrew: Yeah.
Roberta: …how does that compare?
Andrew: Well Twitter is obviously limited to 140 characters by the nature of that’s what Twitter does. So your messages are, necessarily a lot briefer and there’s always a lot going on on Twitter and because there’s so many short messages you sort of dive in and out of what’s going on. So you don’t necessarily catch everything, whereas looking on Facebook it’s far easier to particularly go back through, since the last time you logged on and have a look at what’s happened, whereas Twitter, there’s just so much volume that that’s really not practical.
Roberta: You hear about people, celebrities in particular putting things on Twitter; I really don’t see the point of it.
Andrew: I don’t know, I think there’s some fun to be had there. I certainly enjoy getting news and information. I see a lot of tech and science things come by so yeah, if someone will tweet a headline and link to an article, it’s just a good way to discover that sort of thing, I find. Not so much for the longer stories of what goes on in your life.
Roberta: Well, social media, the Facebook turns 10 this week. I wonder why it took so long to get some good technology going for people with a vision impairment?
Andrew: Perhaps they didn’t see it as a priority in the first place. That may be, yeah, they were concerned with getting a wide user base involved first rather than considering accessibility as part of actually getting that wide user base, which is often a mistake that is made in software development I think. But it’s something that’s more and more on people’s radar, so hopefully we’ll see as things come along, that they’ll be more accessible from the outset.
Roberta: Well thank you for sharing this with us today Andrew on radio, and I hope that you find Facebook a perfect solution to your communications.
Andrew: Yeah, great. Thank you.
Roberta: We’ve been speaking with Andrew Devenish-Meares, and you can follow Andrew’s tandem cycling adventures by going to tandemarmidale.com, that’s all one word, tandemarmidale.com. For more information about social media visit the Media Access Australia website, mediaaccess.org.au, or call the team on (02) 9212 6242. And Media Access Australia are supporters of this programme.