The American Foundation for the Blind put out an excellent article earlier this month regarding the accessibility of Facebook.  This article is very well-written and goes into great detail, using Facebook with Window-eyes.  It talks about the frustrations experienced and gives some great tips to get started with this social media platform.  I wonder if the same steps and details will apply to the new Facebook layout unveiled yesterday?  On Yahoo, many people have strong negative opinions about the new layout.  Ok, so here’s my take.

I’m very glad they kept the shortcut keys, alt+1 for home and the like.  I need to memorize those and use them more frequently now for sure.  Though it’s interesting to see every status update in its own heading, I think that is a bit much.  I can no longer use heading navigation to bypass the statuses and get to another area of the page.  I have no idea what it means when it tells you to “Control the stream using the filters on the left,” and “To hide the stream, click the “x” in the upper right-hand corner of a post.”  There are no keyboard keys to perform this action as far as I can tell.

One positive is that I don’t notice the ads anymore.  I think though, if I just need to quickly update myself on statuses, I’ll use the mobile version of the site, which is more compact and takes a bit less time to get around.  I’m also excited to see what becomes of Project Possibility and AxsJAX with regard to Facebook, and I am still experimenting with Nutshell mail, which I learned about yesterday.  So, like every good adventure, don’t get too comfortable because things are always achangin!