kestrell

I just deleted my Facebook account. Facebook has never been as accessible as I thought it should be, and it's always been a pain in the ass to use. In addition, this recent deal to sell advertising to Oculis so it appears on people XR headsets is really creepy: seriously, sighted people, advertisers are not going to be happy until they can feed advertising to you in your sleep.

I signed up for many of these social media accounts when I was in the media studies program at MIT, when social media seemed all shiny and new and full of promise, but the accessibility hasn't improved all that much since then, while the privacy and security risks have increased exponentially, especially over the past year. It's past time to sign off.

My next step is to delete my Twitter account.

So don't panic: I'm not dead, I'm just not on Facebook or Twitter anymore.

Although it goes against my nature to do anything that sounds so upbeat as "tweet," I'm going to take another stab at it. I recently discovered an app named "Easy Chirp" which makes using Twitter with a screen reader a bit easier.

I don't follow many people, because I find it overwhelming when the interface keeps updating every other second, but if anyone wants to follow me, my handle is kestrell13. The only recent post is one I just made with a link to my Halloween-related post on scare packages and secret witches.

Note that the original NY Times article buried this information in the middle of an article titled "Disability Applications Plunge as the Economy Strengthens," a claim that relies on supposition without real evidence.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/03/11/trump-administration-may-monitor-social-media-to-catch-disabilit/

This is an interesting variation on the stereotype that anyone who is disabled obviously looks and acts disabled. People tell me all the time that I don't look or act disabled. I may have to make my public picture a pic of me holding up both of my prosthetic eyes. FYI, the Social Security Administration does not consider popping your eyeballs out as a documentable demonstration of blindness.

It's one of the ironies of being disabled that there is social pressure, and often pressure by medical and rehabilitation "experts" to not act disabled, but there is a simultaneous pressure to demonstrate that you aren't faking it or malingering.

Here's another interesting quote on how the stereotype is being used by the government:

“This proposal starts with the discriminatory assumption that people with disabilities do nothing socially in the community, or have lives, so that anything the person does on social media can be classified as some form of fraud,” said Eric Buehlmann, deputy executive director of public policy at the National Disability Rights Network, a nonprofit membership advocacy group. He told AARP that methods to detect fraud already exist.
https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/info-2019/ssa-social-media-disability-fraud.html

I've been wanting to try Spotify for about a year, but accessibility reports kept giving Spotify completely negative reviews, and yesterday, when I attempted to download the program from the Spotify Web site, my screen reader crashed. However, recently Spotfy came out with a Facebook interface (there is also an iPhone app, which I've heard is accessible in the premium version). After much poking around, I tink it is possible to use the Spotify Facebook with some accessibility using Jaws, but it is still probably more for the adventurous user who doesn't mind exploring and trying out different things with Jaws.

This is what I did:
I went to the mobile Facebook site
m.facebook.com
and searched for the Spotify Facebook page, then read through some posts until I found a link to a playlist I thought looked interesting, The "Trick or Treat" Halloween playlist
http://open.spotify.com/user/spotifyusa/playlist/5a163KvEqXtkonbBJkp3xV
and clicked on the link to the playlist. The site prompted me to download Spotify, so I saved the program file on my computer, then clicked to install it using my Facebook username and password to log on to Spotify. However, this did require quite a bit of switching between the Jaws and the PC cursor. There was some other stuff to fill in, like your birthday, and also a checkbox which is checked int he default to share what you play on Spotify to Facebook. I admit, Alexx helped with this last bit, but I think it could be done without sighted assistance with some more trial and error.

So once I was logged on to Spotify, I went back to the Spotify Facebook page and clicked on the playlist title, then I used shift+tab in Jaws and hit enter, and the playlist began to play.

At some point, Spotify opens its own window, so there will be the two windows open, the Facebook page with the title of the playlist in the title bar and the Spotify window. There are some keyboard shortcuts which show up by using the alt key to bring up menus.
Hitting the spacebar toggles play and stop.
To go to the next track, press control+right arrow; to go back to the previous track, press control+left arrow (these commands are also available from the keyboard menus).
If you use your Jaws cursor, you can find the title and artist of the currently playing track, although Jaws will also speak this at some point.
At somepoint, there were a few different versions of Jaws scripts for Spotify, but all the links to those scripts are now strangely inactive.

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Entries tagged with social media

I just deleted my Facebook account

On Twitter

Trump administration may monitor social media to detect disability fraud

Some success playing Spotify through Facebook

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February 2024

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