As Facebook grows, our users get more and more diverse. Some attend college, some have grandkids, some live in Norway, some are in relationships, some were born on February 29th, and some Facebook users are blind.

Some of these facts might surprise you ("not my grandparents" and "Norway? No way!" ). And that last group might be particularly surprising. Many sighted people aren't aware that computers today can be extremely accessible to the blind. I say "can be" because there are a couple factors at play:

First of all, a blind user must have access to some kind of assistive technology. The most common type of assistive software for the blind is a screen reader. With a screen reader enabled, a user can tab through different elements on a page while the screen reader verbally describes each element.

While screen readers are pretty effective, they're not people-smart. In order to work properly, they require the program or website they're reading to adhere to certain guidelines. For example, a screen reader can't figure out who is in a picture, but if a picture has a clear descriptive caption, a blind user can better understand what's on the screen.

Most Facebook pages adhere to the guidelines which make the site accessible to the blind community. Recently, however, we received reports from a few devoted users that not all of our features were up to snuff. So, this week we launched a screen-reader accessible version of the Gift Shop . It's currently linked off the help page, though later this week we'll be incorporating it more tightly with the original Gift Shop.

We know there are areas on the site that still require accessibility enhancements. While balancing those enhancements with the rest of the work we have to do, we plan to make those changes soon. If you notice anything else we can do to improve access to Facebook, as always, feel free to submit your suggestions.



Leah is a product manager at Facebook. She's gifted.