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Hi, it’s Mizuki!
The first report of my visit in Silicon Valley is Facebook.
Today, Facebook is used by people of all ages and backgrounds around the world, but was originally limited to college students in the U.S. when it first launched on the Internet.
When I was a college student in Wisconsin, Facebook was a place where only students could access for communication.
It had a different layout and had different communication style between friends.
In my first semester in Wisconsin, I couldn’t speak English well and was unable to communicate with the classmates in class.
However, I could connect with them via Facebook, and could commutate better via writing English (To me, writing English was way easier than speaking at that time).
Facebook helped me so much during my study abroad and I was able to get closer with my classmates in real life while getting closer with them on Facebook!
What made me visit to Facebook is this article.
Facebook is developing a system which can describe the content of an uploaded photo on Facebook, and in the future it also allows a user to ask what is in the photo.
The system would help blind users to communicate with their friends more and more.
By reading the news, I realized for the first time that uploading a photo, making a comment to my friend’s photo which I can do very easily are actually huge barriers to blind or visual impaired people.
“I want to meet the project team!” I thought, and this wish came true.
On the interview day, I arrived very early then went around near the office.
I have known that there is a big “LIKE” board, so I was very excited to take a picture before that.
However…, it was not wheelchair accessible!
There was a step and the ground was filled with wood chips which my wheelchair gets stuck.
So I couldn’t make it by myself.
(……depressed……)
I was looking around because I couldn’t give up easily. So, a female security guard walked to me.
(……oh, do I look suspicious!? )
I was kind of scared, then
“You want to take a picture before the board, right? I can help you!”
She said with a big smile.
She asked another security guard with muscles for a help and they carried me to the board.
I wish this sign were a wheelchair accessible but I was still happy that they noticed me quickly and helped me to make it happen.
The female security guard even took me to the building I’m going to have a meeting and checked-in the reception for me too.
I had such a wonderful experience from the beginning.
Now, here is the main topic.
I met Ms. Shaomei Wu, a data scientist and Mr. Matt King, an engineer.
Shaomei is from China and received her PhD at Cornell University in New York.
She has worked in Facebook for 3 years.
During her research, she found many blind and visually impaired people are actively using Facebook.
Since last year, she has been working with the accessibility team to make Facebook as fun and easy to use for blind and visually impaired people to the same level for users without visual disability.
Matt has worked in IBM for a long time and just joined Facebook last summer.
He is blind and uses a white cane when he walks.
The hallway of the office is pretty wide and other employees swerve naturally not to bump into him.
On his desk, there was an audio mixer which he designed and he uses for work.
One of the challenges that blind and visually impaired people face on Facebook and the Internet as a whole is “seeing a photo”.
For users without a visual disability, it is very easy to upload, edit, tag, or rotate a photo.
However for users with a visual disability it could be really tough.
I noticed that when I saw one of my friend who is blind had uploaded her profile photo with her husband who is also blind.
The picture seemed taken at a nice restaurant and they had a nice dinner or something.
But the picture was actually upside-down.
I was not sure if I should say that to her, because I didn’t want to embarrass her.
Sometimes people upload a photo without really describing the content of the photo.
For example, the other day when I took a flight, my seat was upgraded from economy to first class for free.
I took a picture of the boarding pass and put a description, “Upgraded! Yay!”
For users with a visual disability, they might think “Upgraded for what?”
They cannot write a comment if they want to and they cannot discuss with other friends about a photo either.
Those situation isolated them from social interactions around photos on Facebook.
Many people enjoy sharing photos and it is an important way of communicating with their friends these days, but visually impaired people can’t participant easily.
I wanted to change the situation.
Shaomei said.
As you know, Facebook takes a very big role to exchange information in our daily life.
Not only for communication with friends, we also could use for finding news, events, and business chance.
Facebook’s Accessibility team is striving to make an environment for visually impaired users to be able to manage their information as well as accessing to others’ information like everybody else.
For me, a wheelchair user, I had never felt that “Facebook is not accessible.”
By talking to Shaomei and Matt, I realized there are lots of things that I wouldn’t notice only by my experience.
Something I can do easily might be really difficult for someone to do.
Although there should be many things which can be found only by visual impaired people in this case, I still feel that I want to be a person who can notice those difficulties more.