Visually Impaired Users on an Online Social Network

Shaomei Wu Lada AdamicFacebook Inc.

Menlo Park

Presented bySahithi Thandra

CS886-Winter 2016

1

CS886-Winter 2016

2

✦ Introduction ✦ Data ✦ Demographics ✦ Facebook activity ✦ Content Analysis ✦ Network Structure ✦ Conclusion ✦ Discussion

Contents

CS886-Winter 2016

3

Introduction

✦ Vision Impairment is a prevalent health problem worldwide. ✦ 285 million are visually impaired globally. ✦ 6.6 million are visually impaired in the US.

✦ How do the visually impaired people use the Internet today ?

CS886-Winter 20164

Introduction

✦ Visually impaired people engage with online social networks through technologies such as:

✦ OCR Readers ✦ WAI-ARIA ✦ Screen Readers

✦ They access online networks through Desktop and Mobile.

CS886-Winter 20165

Questions

✦ Behaviour of visually impaired users differ significantly from behavioural patterns of other users?

✦ What kind of content do they produce and share on Social networking sites?

✦ How are visually impaired users’ social networks structured?

CS886-Winter 2016

6

✦ Analysis focuses on Facebook mobile users through VoiceOver. ✦ Facebook’s mobile interface is more accessible and usable for

blind users than Desktop version.

Data

Visually Impaired Users (VoiceOver Sample)

50K

Random sample of Users (iOS Sample)

160K

CS886-Winter 2016

7

Demographics

Rank VoiceOver Sample iOS Sample1 US(32.5%) US(35.5%)

2 UK(7.2%) UK(7.3%)

3 France(4.9%) Japan(4.9%)

4 Germany(4.3%) Canada(3.8%)

5 Italy(4.1%) Germany(3.6%)

CS886-Winter 20168

Demographics

✦ Country: Sample of vision-impaired users are highly skewed towards people from developed western countries.

✦ Age: Both samples are skewed towards young adults. Average age for VoiceOver sample is 30.14 years & iOS sample is 30.43 years.

✦ Gender: Both genders are well represented in two samples.

✦ Users are mostly younger and are with relatively high income.

CS886-Winter 20169

✦ How visually impaired users engage with these 4 types of activities:

✦ Status updates ✦ Photo Sharing ✦ Comments & ✦ Likes

✦ What do visually impaired users do on Facebook? ✦ How do other users interact with the visually impaired?

Facebook Activity

CS886-Winter 201610

Key Findings

Per user activity over three weeks, bootstrap averaged across user samples

CS886-Winter 201611

Question asking behaviour

✦ Overall, question asking behaviour is rare in both populations and asking questions about photos is uncommon.

✦ This result is partly explained by the smaller number of photos uploaded by VoiceOver users.

CS886-Winter 2016

12

Status Updates Two-point trends detection algorithm.

Content Analysis

CS886-Winter 2016

13

Status Updates

✦ Top 10 words from the VoiceOver sample by both metrics are related to vision disability, while words from iOS sample are very general.

✦ Compared to other iPhone users, VoiceOver users on Facebook are much more likely to discuss vision impairment and accessibility issues found in both the physical world and on the Internet.

✦ This data helps to distinguish visually impaired users from other social media users.

Content Analysis

CS886-Winter 201614

Photo Sharing

✦ Why do visually impaired users’ photos not receive as much feedback from others as their status updates do ?

Content Analysis

CS886-Winter 2016

15

Photo Sharing

✦ Many photos uploaded by visually impaired users are automatically created by apps instead of users themselves.

✦ Sighted users may consider these images spammy and ignore them.

Findings

✦ Visually impaired users openly talk about their experiences and issues with vision disability and web accessibility.

Content Analysis

CS886-Winter 2016

16

✦ Can the openness we observe in vision-impaired users be a result of their social networks being denser than average?

✦ What could be the reason behind visually impaired users receiving more comments and likes ?

✦ Is it because they have more friends (and thus a bigger audience) than an average user ?

Network Structure

CS886-Winter 2016

17

Network Size ✦ VoiceOver median friend count of 208 is lower than the iOS

median of 242.

✦ VoiceOver users have on average been on Facebook for 38 months compared to 46 months for the iOS sample.

Network Structure

CS886-Winter 201618

Network Density

✦ The level of diversity in personal social networks is almost identical for users from the VoiceOver sample and users from iOS sample.

✦ Most visually impaired users have closely connected social networks with a few communities, but this is also true for other users on Facebook.

✦ Visually impaired users don’t have denser than average networks over all.

Interconnectivity among visually impaired users.

✦ Visually impaired users are more likely to friend other visually impaired users.

Network Structure

CS886-Winter 2016

19

✦ Visually impaired users use Facebook just like normal Facebook users.

✦ They receive more feedback than average user.

✦ They can use Facebook as an utility to openly share their experience, voice their concerns and receive attention and support from others.

✦ Difference in network size between two groups diminished over time – progress towards increasingly equal and accessible online environment.

Conclusion

CS886-Winter 2016

20

Limitations of the study

✦ Users who access Facebook with VoiceOver and iPhones. ✦ Users are from developed countries with high-economic

status. ✦ History and severity of vision impairment of Users is not taken

into account.

✦ Studied only Facebook users.

CS886-Winter 201621

Design Implications

✦ Auto-detection of users’ vision impairment could help online services to recognize this underserved market.

✦ Auto-detection of visually impaired users could also enable online services to better adapt to their needs.

✦ Currently, there is no a standard and effective method to identify visually impaired users.

✦ If identified, we can redirect visually impaired users to the accessible version of websites.