M.J's personal blog

I normally would only post this on my accessibility blog but I’m so happy about it and the possibilities it presents, I’m posting it here too.

I had previously written a scathing comparative of Myspace and Facebook and their accessibility issues. It is safe to say that both have come back and forth since that time in their accessibility issues and I for one, as most of you will know have changed screen readers. However, the situation with the accessibility seems to be across all boards. Many jaws users are now using facebook mobile due to the sheer volume of info presented on the home page. Although the site is by no means perfect, there’s things that even voice over trips over but I still like to use regular Facebook as I use a lot of the apps and upload a lot of photos which I know can be done by the mobile site but that seems too annoying to me.

Myspace has been a virtual no go for me as I found it really frustrating to navigate let alone edit my profile and stuff which was made impossible to do independently due to the captchas. i understand why captchas are there but it can be highly frustrating for a visually impaired person to get sighted assistance when you want to change the smallest thing on your profile. So because of this I had left myspace and just facebooked it for a while. However, I had read the other day that captchas were being optionally removed by the use of mobile phones. This had been implemented to facebook for some time now and finally myspace caught up. However, this system is only being rolled out in the US for now with reassurances that it will cross over into other regions before long.

Upon reading that, i was impressed. So finally myspace have heard and want to make their users lives a lot easier than having to enter captchas at every turn.

Earlier today I was messing around on my mobile phone on the net and found youbtube have a mobile site. I got intrigued then remembering that other social networks such as facebook and twitter both have mobile sites so surely myspace must have them too right? I searched for mobile myspace on google and there it was. My question now was whether it would let me edit my profile? And it did! I was astounded! So all this time I haven’t been using my myspace at all because of the captcha and there it was all along, the answer to my frustration, m.myspace.com. Although it doesn’t let you do much on the mobile site, it’s enough to get by until the brilliant captcha removal is implemented here in the UK.

So well done myspace! And Facebook, keep working on your accessibility, its coming on but still there’s work to do.

🙂