Amanda Unvarnished

One of the things I love about Micro.blog is that the timeline is chronological. This means I can hit the back button after reading through a conversation and land on the post that started the whole thing off. On Facebook, for example, if I hit the back button, I get dropped to a random point within my newsfeed, and I lose the place I was at. The post from which I rabbitholed is never to be seen again. Thanks, Micro.blog.

I’m writing this because the trend of blind people using Facebook Live is unfortunately spreading.

So, friendly reminder to blind people who are using Facebook Live that it still doesn’t support captions or transcripts and we don’t know when or if it evere will.

I get wanting to do video, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t.

But if you care about accessibility, then you shouldn’t be using a platform that makes it pretty much impossible to not actively discriminate against an entire class of people, in this case deaf and hearing impaired people.

We can sit here and talk about positive impact and other buzzwords all day long. But you can’t good intention or positive impact your way out of this as long as you’re using Facebook Live.

We can sit here and say “don’t do dos and don’ts because it hurts feelings” all day long. But there are somethings that really are as simple as “do” and “don’t” when it comes to accessibility, and prioritizing convenience over one of the most critical and impactful aspects of accessibility by choosing to use a platform that explicitly doesn’t support captions or transcripts is one of those things.

So, if you really do care about accessibility, such that all the hell-raising about inaccessible apps and websites really is more than just looking out for your own interests, don’t use Facebook Live.