Last December, Tasha Chemel agreed to participate in a Facebook study. A professional academic coach at a college, Chemel had been blogging about Facebook’s problems with accessibility for blind people like her and complained directly to the company. She was used to not hearing back. But this time a Facebook envoy had humbly reached out, admitting “that Facebook is not as accessible as it should be, and the frustration with accessibility gaps you and others share with us is understandable.”
He was trying to make things better. Facebook offered Chemel a $75 gift card for her time. But the researcher soon realized the website for choosing a gift card wasn’t fully compatible with the screen readers blind people use to browse the web and asked if Chemel would be OK with an Amazon gift card. The roadblock felt all too familiar. “I’m really not OK with having fewer choices than the non-screen-reader users who complete this survey, and you shouldn’t be OK with it, either,” Chemel responded, and when she didn’t hear back about a fix, she withdrew from the study.
The slip-up felt reflective of how Chemel and many blind users experience Facebook. Often, the company’s apps and websites trip up their accessibility software. Sometimes, they hear that Facebook is earnestly trying to fix the bug, and sometimes, it actually does. And then something else breaks.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/11/facebook-blind-users-no-accessibility.html