[gui-talk] Looking for instructions for understanding Facebooknonvisually

[Lloyd Rasmussen]

I am using Facebook with Window-Eyes 7.1 and Firefox 3.0.11.  I have never
tried the mobile version which was cited in another reply to your message.
IE seems to display more options, especially those that are inactive at the
moment, compared to Firefox, resulting in a more cluttered virtual cursor
buffer.

I have been on Facebook for just over a month and have 61 friends so far.
Many are from my church; some are my cousins, nephews and nieces, and one
brother, who all live a long way from here.  I learn a lot of things, some
of which I am glad to know.

Headings are your friend on Facebook.  If you activate "Notifications", for
example, the new page will have a heading near the beginning marking the
notifications you have received in recent days.  Pressing "Status" brings up
the default for your page, with each person's status message starting with a
level 3 heading.  I don't know whether there is a limit to the length of
status messages; it's certainly longer than the Twitter limit, and it does
serve a similar function for many people.

I find it useful to hit the "Friends" link, which brings up lists of your
friends' friends.  This is a quick way to see who's on and start making
relevant friend requests.  If you want to write your own Status message, you
activate the "What's on your mind?" link.  I have only done this a couple of
times; I'm a lurker, too.

When someone posts a status message, the "like" button will, when activated,
indicate to all and sundry that you liked what was posted.  This will also
cause it to be reloaded with the "like" changed to "don't like" in case you
want to remove your Yes vote.

Facebook is a good example of AJAX or Web 2.0 pages where JavaScript is
heavily used to modify the page without necessarily reloading it.  JAWS may
or may not keep up with the changes.  Most changes are caused by you
activating something; I have only had a couple of instances where a page
changed without my intervention.  Some things I do cause the page to go into
Forms Mode and I have to resume virtual cursor mode to read what changed.
You will also often need to use your Find feature to get back to the place
on the page where the change occurred.  In other cases, you activate a link,
such as to see more comments or more posts, and you will not see the changes
until you reload the virtual cursor buffer (Insert-Escape).  I'm using JAWS
terminology, and expect that some of this will work differently in JAWS than
it does in WE.  This is a place where having an up-to-date screen reader,
which you have, should help a little.

I think that unless you change some of your options, your friends can view
what you and others have posted on your wall.

I haven't figured out many things yet, such as Chat and the thousands of
applications you can add to your wall.  (Many of these are visual, but I
wouldn't be surprised if some of the quizzes might be accessible.

I hope this helps a little.  Enjoy Facebook!  Don't let it take over your
life, or get too stressed because you don't understand what it's doing.  The
Help system has a lot of info in textual form, but I didn't find some of the
more basic stuff that people should just visually understand, I suppose.
Have fun!

Lloyd Rasmussen, Kensington, Maryland
Home:  http://lras.home.sprynet.com
Work:  http://www.loc.gov/nls
www.facebook.com/lloyd.rasmussen
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Joel Deutsch
> Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 4:24 PM
> To: GUI-Talk
> Subject: [gui-talk] Looking for instructions for understanding
> Facebooknonvisually
> 
> I use Jaws 10 and IE 7. I've finally caught up with the times and gave up
> enough of my habitual introversion to register on Facebook, but although
> I've managed somehow to invite and be invited by a few friends, in general
> I
> can't really understand how the site's functions work or what's going on
> when one or the other site pages load in response to my activating this or
> that link.
> 
> The closest I can come by way of comparison is the main Amazon site, which
> took me ages to become a pretty good navigator of, to the point where
> choosing to use their simplified and less graphical mobile site is now a
> choice, not a dependency, because I know so many screen elements to search
> for and skip to and/or single letter Jaws commands to use.
> 
> But I can't, at least  right now, imagine getting anywhere near such skill
> with Facebook, not just because I can't simply see the layout of the
> pages,
> which sighted friends assure me is a frightful mess even if you're not
> dealing with a screen reader. it's because I don't understand most of the
> terminology of the site and what the things Jaws speaks to me actually
> mean.
> 
> Just for instance: I guess that commenting is an important way you
> maintain
> a dynamic presence on the site. And with a couple words of helpful
> suggestion from a sighted friend who's a little more up on things than I
> am,
> I guess I learned that the word "status" and the updating of one's status
> has nothing to do with your health, being coupled or single, and so forth.
> it's more like what's up with you at the moment, or as the note on the
> screen says, what's on your mind. So you're supposed to do what I read
> that
> they do on twitter? Say I'm eating breakfast now and I just love this
> banana! and that's your "status" pronouncement of the moment? Or something
> a
> little more complex and wordy if you prefer, I guess. But that seems to be
> the idea. The word "status" doesn't really mean anything, here, not in the
> English I speak. But I think I get it, and that's what's important.
> 
> Okay. So if I wanted to sort of blog on my part of the site, I'd type and
> press Upload Status occasionally.
> 
> Then people could comment, like say I hate bananas or sometimes a banana
> is
> just a banana, Ingrid and the next person could just type LOL.
> 
> but beneath each comment from someone on my Friends list, I see two links.
> The first one says dash comment, which I guess is an invitation to type a
> comment to someone else's posting. Okay. I'll try that sometime. But
> beneath
> that, jaws says "dash Like." Now here's another example of ordinary words
> whose meaning I obviously don't get on Facebook. if you click on Like,
> what
> happens? have you voted for the comment you just read, for instance? I
> don't
> see a "dislike" link. What else could it mean besides "I like that
> comment?"
> I know this is a dumb, dumb question. but I don't get any of this, and I
> have a feeling this is a really essential part of participation.
> 
> I wanted to go on to ask what a Wall is, and what writing on it means, but
> I'll save that. first I'd like to see if anyone knows anything to begin
> with. And sure, if in the Help section of that site, somewhere, there's
> actual instruction about what all this means and how to use the site so
> that
> I could stop trying to intuit it navigating with Jaws and hearing all this
> repetitious gibberish and ads, someone tell me where to look for
> education.
> 
> Thanks, everybody.
> Joel
> 
>