Facebook Accessibility with Voice Over completely broken

Got the update yesterday and can no longer comment and coppying and pasting doesnt work. I am so angry and they wont fix it for a long time usually. If it does get fixed faster I will be surprised.

Companies don't need a government mandate to break accessibility. They're perfectly capable of breaking it all on their own.

The Facebook website has been broke on MacOS with no sign of ever improving. VoiceOver announces several links as, "Facebook". The date of each post is an unlabeled image that you might, or might not, be able to read with VO+Shift+L. And they have an inconsistent naming scheme for their text fields, so I never know whether to look for the "Say Something" box or the "What's on your mind" box or skip those altogether and look for the Create Post button. Don't even get me started on how complicated it is to maintain more than one Facebook profile.

American new government's choices are with no doubt influencing companies' behaviours. We can not look the other way about this.
But politics is not the only factor conditioning those unrecoverable breakups.
Meta -Facebook company- has declared it since long time, they're investing a lot into AI and algorithms, to replace human employees as much as possible. For developing, for testing, they want to reach the biggest result with the least effort and lowest cost.
This produces lack of accessibility of course, but even lower quality of product - and contents! I have left Facebook on January 17th, account permanently deleted on February 16th and have no regret at all. If I want a social network, I have Mastodon or the rest I leave them to f*** ...Fade out themselves.
To be completely honest, I have had this suspicion since long time, since they created their so-called "automated alt text in photos". This system to attract blind users, in the end has been a marketing strategy to allow their engines to scan photos and collect even more data.
I am not against the use of AI, but I hate to feel used by algorithms which should help but in the end gradually destroy quality.
Enshittification is also seen in these more and more evident accessibility issues.
Am I too drastic? Maybe, but a company which has not a post-sale assistance is not a reliable company. "post-sale" not because you necessarily pay, but if I give them my personal data and life, I would like to be able to contact them and discuss issues with them in case of problems affecting my usage of the platform.
It's nothing personal or accessibility-related. It's because I can't trust a product which provides no assistance.
And, with these premises, despite enthusiastic comments, I will not buy Meta Rayban glasses. For me they can stay on their shelves all life long.

Asking as mine is working fine and I'm on v503.0

well, instagram dm have never been accessible (for reading) with any screen reader / browser combination for ages... Messenger gets a new look at each update...

Wait. Sorry guys but I have the latest update and literally everything works as usual for me here. Can post and comment and copy paste as well, running ios 18.4 latest beta as well.

Hi,
I have iOS18.4 beta 3 on my iPhone 15 pro.
As others have stated, I'm unable to comment, using the latest update to the app. I'm hoping these issues get fixed soon, but until they do, I'll access Facebook using the desktop website with Brave. I may also try the Android app on my BrailleSense again because the last time I tried composing a post with it, focus jumped all over the place, causing me to seriously mess up what I was trying to write.
Let's advocate for these issues to be fixed! :)

Yes, I know! When they fix things, they break things. I hope that it won't be another six months before they fix it again, but you just never know.

Where do or can we report these bugs? is there an accessibility email? I hope it doesn't take another 6 months either.

I have exactly that and the latest beta of ios on my 14. Also device in english, I'm in Canada. I really tried to reproduce this bug but can't, I know how frustrating this can be so really best of luck @everyone.

I left a 1 star review yesterday. Maybe more people should do the same, and tell them exactly what is broken. I don't think just a few reviews will do the trick, but if they started getting a ton of one star reviews, maybe they would pay more attention.
I am also experiencing this. Can you technically write/comment? Yes. You can. Can you review any of the text written, and thus make changes? No, no you can not. I can say that when you enter a comment field for example, that the keyboard does indeed pop up, and if you can manage to type and make no mistakes, or quickly fix them without having to review the text, you can actually post a comment. But you have to swipe to the post button, as it is not possible to find by exploring by touch. So, it is technically possible to do so, but not really that intuitive or easy. It should have not happened.
I also mentioned in my review that react was removed from the quick actions. So, in order to react, you have to actually go in to the post, long press on the like button, then choose your reaction, where before, you could just swipe down on the post until getting to react, then double tap that, then choose the reaction. So having to go in to the post first takes a lot longer.

I know I can't proofread posts at the moment, but I didn't realize it won't allow pasting either. I have an FB post that I need to post first thing on Monday morning pertaining to an upcoming cruise. I suppose I'll have to try using the computer if the fb app isn't fixed by then. If it's still broken on Sunday night, I'll probably try to have FB open on my computer so that I can do this particular time-sensative post before I leave for work. I've also heard that the facebook mobile site is no longer a thing, so now I'm worried about how I'll get my post sent to Carnival. I almost never post anything on facebook, but this issue is impacting commenting as well. Let's hope they figure out what they broke and fix it really soon!

As stated in my previous post, commenting and posting is not utterly impossible, but it is very frustrating. I have been able to post comments, but I definitely think a lot more before I do so. How important is it really? Is it worth the doubled or tripled time it's gunna take? So yeah, I do hope it gets fixed soon.

Yep like a total idiot I updated yesterday to V504 and now have the same issue. However, as stated you can post you just don't know if it reads correct first. Not ideal.

Don't worry, it'll take them a year to fix this one. I'm having the same issue here too. I wonder why they even have an accessibility team at all if they can't do the simple job of testing making sure everything still works. Riddle me this one. When things get fixed everytime something new breaks and I'm quite getting sick of this mentality of companies not testing things especially when they clame they have all the resources and when things break, they take their sweet time fixing critical stuff. Do we all remember the messenger bug of VO reading a ton of messages at once when you've already read them? Yeah, almost a year and a half to fix. Let's not forget you can't even send feedback reliably. This is totally unacceptable and disgusting. I've lost trust. So just remember, every time they fix something it'll only be a matter of time to where they'll either break the same thing or something else that has to do with some of the same things. This is why I never get excited when they fix things because they'll just break things yet again. There's gotta be a way where we can get their attention and apparently the convo that NFB had with them isn't enough.

Seems like, if they would use standard text boxes, we would be able to enter, edit, and review text without issue. Why do they feel the need to reinvent such an old and basic UI component?

Reminds me of when Uber redesigned their accept terms and conditions checkbox a while back, which came up just as you were about to confirm your ride request. Unless you knew to turn on screen recognition, you would almost certainly end up late for your appointment.

I thought they had a parnership with NFB which they announced in December. If NFB was doing anything useful this wouldn't happen.

anything that NFB does nowadays is not productive.

No clue if it will help, but someone on this thread suggested leaving facebook a 1 star review. It probably won't make any meaningful difference, but I've done it anyway. I tried to clearly explain the reason for my rating as well; maybe if we're lucky, they'll fix it if they know what the problem is.

Facebook does have a contact form for reporting bugs. Not sure how much attention they actually pay to it, but accessibility is one of the options, and it includes fields to specify which assistive technology you're using, so I figure it can't be worse than trying to report issues to a social media account that's been dormant for years. The link is https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/169372943117927

Hi friends.
I have this issue too, Tex field does not show up in comments, however, the good news is that after the comment has been posted, if you double tap and hold it and then click edit, the text field appears normally, and you can edit your comment as you wish.
But the funniest of all is that not everyone is affected. I have an iPhone 12 Pro, and some folks I know with a more recent iPhone do not seem to be affected, but i’ve seen on this thread that someone who has an iPhone 15, if I remember correctly, has the problem as well. So it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the iPhone model one is using.
What can it be? It’s worth investigating isn’t it?
Cheers,
JP R

Hello again,
for the record, I have tried removing the app from my iPhone and reinstalling it. Do yourself a favor, don't waste your time on this, it will not change anything.
Cheers,
JPR

Well that form link worked fine for me so have sent them a report.

Hi,
If you shake your phone from within the Facebook app, you can send a report.
I just did this the other day.
You may also want to send an email to [email protected] & tell Jonathan Mosen about our experiences.
I think he can reach out to Facebook.

Well i sent a report off. Lets see if anything comes from this. Seems like something is always broken on there. I could deal with having to react when i had to open the full post but not being able to post or in this case comment is so frustrating.

I occasionally get into Facebook, usually through a desktop browser, where accessibility has always been pretty bad. But I just don't use social media, or care enough about it, to spend my time submitting issue reports. I wish you all good luck with this, and I hope we see some real change.

This kind of thing makes me miss the days when facebook was totally new, and other than a few inaccessible captchas at signup which friends helped me get around, and disappeared after id verification, Facebook on the web was so incredibly easy to navigate. And there was a time you could even chat with your facebook peeps on MSN Messenger. Those were the days y'all. And that program was soooooo accessible. Even got the Windows Live Messenger for web working on my old BrailleNote's web browser. Thought I was being sooo sneaky chatting it up in college classes, with profs thinking I was just taking a lot of notes. lol Fun times.

I'm convinced fb really doesn't have an accessibility team, they just want us to think they do.

I'm glad to report that comments at least seem to be fixed. Haven't tried actually posting something yet, but I did go in and leave a comment, with no problems at all.

I had version 504.0, and this afternoon I noticed that comments had been fixed. I update all of my apps manually, and when I went into the App Store, I saw that there is now a version 505.0 available. But the fix appears to have been made in place to version 504.0.

I've got an iphone 16 running iOS 18.3.2, and if anything, the facebook update that came out today seems to have made things worse for me. Thankfully, I'm going on vacation at the end of the week and plan to be off the grid as much as possible. Maybe it'll be fixed by the time I get home on April 1?

Was that an April Fools joke? 😛

Yes I'm happy to say that I can comment again.

Think we do have to give credit here to FB V505 has fixed the issue for me, so not sure why not for all. However, as most of this thread has been negative to FB the fact they fixed it on the next release and within a few days should be noted.

Xs Max with standard typing.

It works now. I swear it didn't this morning, but oh well. I'm glad for it.

It works for me as well.

Hi. I updated to V 505.0 on my iPhone 15. I am happy to report that commenting and posting using voice over is working once again with no issues. I also think we need to give credit where credit is due. To FB for fixing the commenting bug in V 505 without the blind/VI community waiting forever for a fix. :)

That's a world record.

Thanks Facebook.
I'm wondering if the fuss we made about this accessibility bug has anything to do with its quick fixing, but it's good to know it's gone.
Cheers,
JPR