“Building Social Good” – Facebook conference

July 4, 2016

Other

On 13.06.2016, EUD was invited to a meeting by the Brussels office of Facebook on the subject of how Facebook works on “Building Social Good”. One of the speakers was Matt King, a blind person who is an accessibility specialist at Facebook. He presented various accessibility features Facebook already provides as well as on-going work for future ones.

For instance, users already have the possibility to upload a captioning file together with his or her private video, so that a deaf or hard of hearing person can watch the video with captions. Furthermore, Facebook is working with a speech-to-text software company in order to implement a feature that would allow deaf and hard of hearing users to watch every video with automatically produced and accurate captions. Current trials provide for accuracy of captions between 60% and 80%, but there are hopes for higher accuracy after further testing and development.

More information on Facebook’s accessibility features can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/help/141636465971794/

Users have the possibility to contact Facebook’s accessibility team for feedback on the current features and suggestions for future ones here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/169372943117927