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#iACast 74: Social Media

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On this episode of the iA Cast, Michael Doise, Anne Currie, Aleeha Dudley, and Jason Earls talk about social media and we cover social media networks many others have not thought of. These include:

We hope that you have enjoyed this episode of the iA Cast. Please leave us feedback by emailing feedback@iaccessibility.net or using our twitter hashtag of #iACast. Want to help the iACast network? head to our Patreon and become a patron for as little as $1 a month.

Vero: The surprisingly Accessible Social Network

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As social media continues to evolve, several applications have promised to be the new Facebook or Instagram, and  one application in particular has gone above and beyond to provide an accessible and user-friendly experience for everyone.

How does it work

Vero promises to be an app like Instagram. The user can post about books, movies and TV, Links, Photos, and more. It is interesting to note that the app does not support plan text posts, so it makes the user be more creative with regards to what they post. My first post was about the current book that I am reading.

You will also find that people can follow you, but there are no ads or algorithms, so what you see is what you get and in the order you were meant to receive it.

Advantages

As I said earlier, Vero doesn’t have any ads and it doesn’t have any algorithms. Users that sign up now will get a free lifetime membership, so if and when Vero adds paid subscriptions, you will remain a free member.

Accessibility on the Vero app is amazing, and it appears that VoiceOver works throughout the app. VoiceOver users can read alt text on photos and book recommendations.

Conclusion

While Vero may not be the replacement for Facebook and Instagram that everyone wants, it does provide an alternative for those who want a small social network between friends and followers.

#iOS11 is not as social as iOS 10

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iOS 11

Background

In the past, iOS contained built in social media sharing features which included Twitter and Facebook. These features made it easy for apps to connect to social platforms in order to share content with features built right in to iOS. In iOS 11, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, these features have been removed. As a result, users will now be responsible for installing and using social network apps from the App Store that have share extensions and account management.

While, on the surface, this seems like a big deal, it really has been coming for some time. For a while now, Facebook has been authenticating 3rd party app logins through their own app or from their mobile webpage, instead of using the iOS login prompts.. You can even sync your contacts through the Facebook app, which used to be managed in iOS settings

So What Does This Mean for Apps?

At the time of this writing, a lot of Twitter applications use the built-in Twitter APIs in iOS. As a result, they will need to be updated so that they do not give an error that there are no Twitter accounts set up in the settings app.

Conclusion

While I think that this update to the handling of social sharing will not change much in the way of everyday consumers using their iOS devices, I think it was a great thing to be able to manage all  social account logins from one place in the Settings app. Android has this, and a user can even add accounts  that were not included with the OS. I doubt they would do this, but I really hope that the engineers at Apple have something in mind to replace the previous social framework, and will surprise us in a future version of iOS.

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