Re: Make Facebook's live chat accessible to blind screen reader users?

  • From: Jared Wright <wright.jaredm@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2010 01:16:32 -0400

Indeed, if Facebooks' native chat in the browser is too much work, Miranda and Pigeon both have very good plugins to the Facebook chat interface. I have many sighted friends who think I'm nuts for using the browser flavor, in fact. Maybe I am.

On 4/17/2010 1:12 AM, Tyler Littlefield wrote:
People tend to create patitions and scream and yell at devs before they'll find 
workarounds. fb chat works, though it takes a bit of work to make it so. Much 
better ways exist such as miranda (I believe it has a fb add-on), adium, etc.
                Thanks,
Tyler Littlefield
        http://tds-solutions.net
        Twitter: sorressean

On Apr 16, 2010, at 11:09 PM, Jared Wright wrote:

What are you talking about? It's already accessible; I've got a whole bevy of 
chats going right now.
On 4/16/2010 8:35 PM, Bryan Garaventa wrote:
Hi, I thought I'd pass this on since it may be of interest to fellow screen 
reader users.

Since there really is no reason why Facebook can't add screen reader accessible 
functionality to the live chat feature, and it would be nice to be able to 
communicate with family and friends using the same features that everyone else 
uses, I created the fan page at

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Make-Face-Books-Live-Chat-Accessible-to-Blind-Users/109349762439299?ref=ts

In the hope that, if enough people become fans of the idea, it will act as a 
petition to get Facebook's attention. So if you use Facebook, and would like to 
see live chat become an accessible feature, please consider becoming a fan of 
the page.

The UI implementation that I've proposed through the fan page does the 
following:
     1) Automatically announces the latest message as soon as it arrives, 
regardless where the focus is positioned on the page;
     2) Is fully accessible using JAWS 11 with IE7-8 and Firefox3;
     3) Is fully accessible using NVDA with IE8 and Firefox3;
     4) Can be visually modified using CSS to fit any display without impairing 
automatic accessibility.

Best wishes,
Bryan
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