Sunday, July 26, 2015

Anti-Social Media - AAARRRGH!!!

OK, I finally bit the bullet and got a Facebook account.  I started a crowd-funding campaign a couple months ago and they say it won't come up in the public search directory unless you have your campaign connected to Facebook.  This makes absolutely no sense to me at all, but eventually I caved in and tried to set up a Facebook account.

And yes, Facebook is almost as much of a pain in the butt as I'd thought it would be.  I at least managed to set up the account and put some good stuff on there, and I've even started to check out a couple people's profiles, but man it's just one more social media site that's basically a hassle to use.  Since I'm almost totally blind I use a keyboard and screen reader to access the computer, and aside from having to slog through all the links and clutter before I find the link I want, I found I couldn't even open the links that had submenus.  I'm lucky I have a little bit of sight so I can try to use the mouse to open them, but it's still damn hard to do.  Having said this, Facebook's still more accessible than I expected it to be.  At least my screen reader reads out all the links that don't have submenus attached.  There's no way to read people's photos and stuff, but it at least reads the text that isn't contained within an image.

I'm not much of a social media user and probably won't be one any time soon.  But I also recognize that social media can be used to do positive things, and that's why it pisses me off even more when my screen reader slows down or crashes every time I try to use social media (whether it's my blog, my Twitter account, LinkedIn or Facebook).  I've e-mailed at least a couple of these companies to try to improve accessibility for people using screen readers, but although they sound like they're interested in fixing the problems nothing's happened yet.  So guys, could you PLEASE hurry the fuck up and make your sites more accessible for people with disabilities?  I'm about ready to run over someone with my chair from sheer frustration!  Not that I think violence is the right way to solve anything, but this social media crap is making me even more anti-social than usual.  AAARRRGH!!!