Bringing Non-Visual Access
to a Social Media Playing Field
Seminars@Hadley
Bringing Non-Visual Access
to a Social Media Playing Field
Presented by
Larry Lewis
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
March 29, 2016
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Bringing Non-Visual Access to a Social Networking Playing Field. Our presenter today is the founder and president of Flying Blind LLC, Larry Lewis. Larry has worked very closely with Hadley through the years as a subject matter expert and writer of several of our technology courses. Today Larry’s gonna share his professional insights on making the most of the exciting world of social media. Without any further ado, I’m gonna welcome Larry and we’ll get underway. Larry, welcome, and take it away.
Larry Lewis
Good afternoon. Before I lock my microphone I want to make sure that you can hear me and I’m gonna release the mic and then we can proceed. I’ll go ahead and lock the mic once you confirm.
Larry Muffett
Please go ahead.
Larry Lewis
All right. Thank you, Larry. The mic is locked right now and the way I would like to run this is we have quite a bit to cover today with this presentation, so I’m going to be operating under the assumption that we have a number of different customers or consumers in the classroom right now for this seminar, and so I need to address the needs of those of you who have very little to no social networking experience. There are some of you who I see and who I personally know who have some social networking experience. I want to try to work to make sure that we accomplish a number of different things in an hour from very beginner type questions all the way up to how I might use social networking as somebody who runs a business and different things like that. We have a lot to cover and I think the best way to handle this is I’m going to speak for about 15 or 20 minutes, open it up for a couple of questions, and then we’ll get back into the latter part of the webinar where I can focus on a little bit more advanced type things and do a little bit of product demonstration as it relates to actually engaging with these webinars.
Before I get started, I wanted to thank Larry and all the great folks at Hadley just for the opportunity to speak with you all. I got an exciting message this morning that we were actually fairly full as far as capacity goes for the webinar, and it is Monday afternoon, and I want to thank everybody who joined us. There are a lot of things you could be doing right now besides listening to me talk about a topic that’s very important to me, and you chose to be here. I’m very, very grateful for that.
The name of the webinar is Bringing Non-Visual Access to a Social Network Playing Field and I want to just go over a couple objectives that I want to make sure that we meet today. The first thing that I want to do is I want to define what a social network is. That may seem very simplistic to you, but I think we all need to stop thinking in terms of just going on Facebook or those sorts of things and think in terms of what actually is a social network. The second thing that I want to do is to optimizing communications with social networking. I want to focus on components of a social network. There are really three types of things that I want to do today. What is it, how can we optimize it, and then talk about the different components of a social network.
Let’s talk a little bit about what a social network is. I bet when some of you logged on today, you didn’t really think that you were social networking. I think there are probably some of you, when you hear the term social network, you think about sending a tweet, you think about making a Facebook post, but, in fact, this webinar, this Talking Communities room, would be an example of social networking to some degree. If we define social networking, we would do so by saying that it’s really a process by which participants interact online using online services through virtual communities designed to enable them to obtain, interact with, and share information. And from my perspective, this web conferencing service would be an example of how we might engage with one another through a virtual community, be it through my voice, your voice, text chat, or what have you. And so we are social networking right now. Everybody who’s here is part of the social network phenomenon. I’m sure there’s a few of you who probably didn’t think you were, but you actually are.
Persons subscribing to these services often – really what drives us to really engage with one another in social networks is we have very similar type interests. Those interests could be fun interests. Those interests could be employment based. Those interests could be educationally oriented. What you see a lot of times in high school and college and what not are teachers who use social networks to convey information to their students, and vice versa; the students are able to engage with their teachers as well.
These persons may also wish to reconnect with colleagues and friends and so forth. I can’t explain to you how amazing it is for me having moved around quite a bit in my career, and also moved around physically a fair amount in my lifetime, how much fun it is for me to connect with individuals who I went to school with, individuals who I worked with before, who I used to work with in different types of employment situations. I have friends on social networking who I interact with all the way back to probably second or third grade. It’s pretty incredible, actually, just being able to keep up with folks personally, being able to engage with individuals who I’ve worked with in the past, see what they’re up to, explore ways that I can work with them in the future, and so forth.
Social networking can also be used for recruiting professionals and expanding networks and so forth. I know there’s a Center for Entrepreneurship at Hadley, and know Colleen and some folks are very engaged with that. Gone are the days of the want ads where you would go pick up a paper and thumb through the want ads and apply for a job. That may exist a little bit, but nowadays we have more online capabilities where we can search for jobs, apply for jobs, accept jobs, employers can be out there looking for us and so forth, and that begins to really level the playing field for persons who are visually impaired who can’t go to the local convenience store and pick up their local paper. That’s very exciting, too.
Applications can be developed and shared through these social networks. We’re gonna take a look at that a little bit later on as I get into some of the demonstration that’s occurring.
As I alluded to earlier, social networking is not so much just about a couple of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There are in fact really – and it grows all the time – there are over 200 online social networks that we can account for. That doesn’t really take into account places like different organizations who create their own internal online communities for their employees and those sorts of things. These social networks really got started in the late ’90s, so to speak. And for those of you who have been around a while, and I see the list here, some of you have been using technology for a little while, you can probably think about, or think in terms of, hearing the phrase that you haven’t heard in quite some time called a bulletin board, an online bulletin board. What an online bulletin board would be would be more or less a website that you would go to, information would be posted there, and that information would be changed by webmaster; information for you to review, maybe you could make comments about it. That would really be the first starting point as it relates to social networking as it’s morphed into what we know it today.
Those bulletin boards have given way to things like Listservs where you would have a list, an email list, that could be managed either through a website or through an email client. Somebody posts information and you can reply back to that information either through a website or through an email client. This industry, this adaptive technology industry that we’re in, still uses Listservs quite a bit just to share information, to send information out to email subscribers, and that’s all controlled through very rudimentary, very fundamental type social network type knowhow. But, sometimes bulletin boards and Listservs aren’t really enough.
In early 2000, social networks really began to evolve into what we know them today. Really, the underlying software for social networking that’s being used is cloud-based technology. That’s cloud, like a cloud that you would – you know, the sun and the clouds and so forth. Think in terms of applications residing in a virtual cloud that are just out there somewhere hosted on the internet. When you think in terms of social networking, really, some of the advantages that a cloud provides for a social network are accessing information in real-time anywhere and cross-platform. What that means is, right now on my desk for this webinar I have a laptop that’s running Talking Communities for the webinar here, for the Hadley room, I’ve got a laptop to the right of me that I’ll be using in a demonstration, and I have an iPhone, I have an iPad, I have an android tablet. I have about 5 or 6 different types of devices in my office, all of which have their own methodologies for getting to the Cloud, for getting to the internet, and for accessing various types of cloud-based social networks.
The exciting thing about cloud-based technology is you can determine what type of social networker you want to be. Do you want to be a social networker – and there’s no right or wrong answer here – but a question you need to ask yourself, do you want to be a social networker that is tied to a computer? Maybe you’re very comfortable in your home, in your office or whatnot, and your social networking occurs from within your computer, and that can be a desktop or a laptop computer.
Do you want to be a social networker who’s in motion? What I mean by that is, we have all sorts of devices out here today, and I don’t want to digress and get into all the different types of technology out here, but we live in a time where we can utilize iPads, we can utilize Windows tablets, we can utilize android tablets, we can utilize cell phones, all sorts of types of cell phones, be it an iPhone or an android phone or whatever. Do you want to be that type of user where, instead of logging onto your computer and going to the internet, do you want to be a type user that uses applications that are designed to access the same sort of information in the Cloud?
Or, do you want to be a type of user that – I would consider myself one of those types of hybrid users – where you think in terms of what sort of task do I want to complete and then what tool would be the best for completing those different sorts of tasks?
There are a few different components to your social network experience that I want to talk about, then we’ll talk about assistive technologies for social networking, and then what I’ll do is I’ll take a little bit of a break so that we can ask a couple of questions, and then we’ll actually get into determining how we actually use these sorts of networks before we ask a few more questions.
Selecting a social network is really important for a specific task. Do we want to tweet out a little bit of information? Do we want to share a lot of information? Do we want to search for a job? Do we want to upload our resume? Do we want to actually use an application like Facebook, which I’m gonna demonstrate a little bit later on, to grow our specific business? Do we want to link social networks together so that, when I make a tweet, it posts on multiple platforms, like Facebook, at the same time, so I can kill two birds with one stone? We want to select what sort of social networking can get the job done.
The second thing that we need to determine is browser versus app. We talked a little bit about that on our desktop computer. We want to focus primarily on using a browser, and there are a couple of types we can use. We can use Internet Explorer, which is familiar to most. We can use Mozilla Firefox, which I happen to think, sometimes, does a little bit of a better job. We can use Safari, for those of you who like to use Macintosh. And then we can use our mobile type sites as well so that, instead of going to a full-blown website, maybe we want to use a website that is designed specifically for a cell phone or something like that on our desktop computer, to get the job done. I’ll talk a little bit about that as well. We can use a browser or we can use an actual app. There are actual apps that are developed for social networks. There’s a LinkedIn app, a Facebook app, a Twitter app, some things that we’re going to take a look at, and they organize things very differently than you will see when you go into a browser and you see a webpage. That will make quite a bit of sense as I get into the demonstration as well.
A couple of other things you will need to do is create an account for your respective social network, user name, password, and so forth, and then you’ll need to establish your profile. And again, depending on the social network you’re using, that can be work information, that can be fun information about yourself, where you’re from, your different types of interests, and so forth. A lot of it will depend, but your profile sort of gives folks who want to connect with you a snapshot of who you are.
The different types of content that we can actually share with these types of social networks could range in anything from sharing in documents, uploading your resume to LinkedIn per se – pardon me. As I said, I have multiple things going on here. I just had a computer next to me log off. We can also share videos, we can share photos, we can blog and share different types of things from the internet and so forth. Now we to determine how we’re gonna share information. Are we gonna use devices like the cameras on our phones to take pictures and upload them, or videos and upload them? Are we going to visit, because we’re comfortable using internet technology on our computer, are we gonna go to specific sites, write a blog or what have you, and then go in and share that blog to the blogger site? There are different strategies where we have to determine how it is we’re actually going to share that information. Instant messaging, or private messaging, is very important, and we’ll talk a little bit about that as well.
Some benefits of social networking: the ability for participants to customize their profiles and content to really just sort of determine how they want to interact with information. I used to subscribe to all different types of newspapers and pay money and do all that stuff for myself just to keep current with things. Not so much anymore. I really do all of my reading of the news and so forth through social networking. That would be one example of that. The ability to network to enhance one’s career, we talked a little bit about that. And an efficient means of connecting with friends and so forth.
A couple of other obstacles that we want to be aware of – there are really two major obstacles that we need to think in terms of. The first would be for, really, as it relates to desktop browsers. When you’re in a social network in an internet browsing session, two things can happen. Information can refresh automatically and the page can change on you before you’re ready for it to change; you could be using a screen reader. Or, information doesn’t change at all and you have to remember to press, in many cases, CTRL + F5 would be your refresh button, to refresh the contents of the screen so you have the most up-to-date information within your social network.
The second obstacle would be a little bit more apps based. It’s a concept that’s called Agile Development. What Agile Development is, Agile Development means people are making updates all the time, developers are making updates all the time, and your iDevice, your android device, if it’s not set up properly, will just automatically install the latest updates of Facebook or Twitter or whatever you have installed. That can create problems if those get broken, so you have to understand that if you have your updates set to automatically update, it’s definitely an issue.
Couple of really quick things before I break for questions. As far as our access tools for the actual demonstration portion coming up after this question and answer session, you have your screen reading technology and your screen magnification technology that can be set up for either a mobile device, like your iPhone or your android device, or your full desktop screen reading technology or screen magnifier, such as, whatever, ZoomText, Window-Eyes, JAWS, Non-Visual Access, whatever it is you like to use.