I’ve been reading the great report by Media Access Australia, Sociability: Social media for people with a disability, and it got me inspired to find the “quick reference guide that can provide support for the most likely issues including keyboard shortcuts and contacting Facebook directly.”

I did find it, but it’s not so obvious.

First I did a search for “accessibility help” and my search results were “No results found for your query. Check your spelling or try another term.”

Further searches for “accessibility quick guide”, “disability help” and “keyboard shortcuts” either brought back no results or pages created by Facebook users but it didn’t bring up the Facebook help I was looking for.

A search for “accessibility” brings up a single Interest Page with a definition of accessibility taken from Wikipedia. Further searches for “accessibility” brought up search suggestions for Yahoo’s accessibility page and IBM’s accessibility page. These companies are both making good on the opportunity to promote what they’re doing to promote accessibility. It would be great if Facebook did the same.

So next I went looking for Facebook help but the link for that doesn’t jump out at you either.

You can either find the Help link under the down arrow to the right of the Home link in the top banner or in the footer – the footer help link can be difficult to get to since Facebook’s timeline feature generates further content as you scroll down, so if it’s an active page you’re on, you probably won’t make it to the footer.

Unfortunately the Help Centre under the down arrow can’t be accessed via the keyboard. You can get to the drop-down list and then select the Help option, but from there all of the options are inaccessible to the keyboard. The Return key does nothing, arrow keys scroll the background page and the tab key closes the help list.

But you can get to the Help Centre – assuming you can use a mouse – here’s how:

1. Select the down arrow in the top menu and click Help
2. Click on Visit the Help Center
3. Select Facebook Basics
4. Then Manage Your Account
5. In the Manage your account list of topics select Using Facebook with
6. Screen Readers and Other Assistive Technology

And you’ve finally made it!

The help topics are listed on the cover:

• Assistive technology and virtual keyboards
• Registering with Facebook using a screen reader
• The mobile HTML only versions of Facebook
• Reporting problems with assistive technology
• Increasing and decreasing the font size
• Using Facebook Chat with a screen reader
• Making photos accessible to assistive technology
• Shortcut keys for the main pages on the site
• Shortcut keys for chat

How helpful this information is will be looked at in another post.

In summary if you are looking for accessibility help on Facebook keep this link, bookmark it and get it out there: http://www.facebook.com/help/accessibility. Alternatively, do a Google search for “Facebook accessibility” and you’ll get this page straight away.

Also if your organisation uses Facebook make this link available to your users on your Facebook Page or wherever else you have your accessibility information.