Jessie Lorenz cant see Facebook. But it gives her a better way to see the worldand it gives the world a better way to see her.

Lorenz has been blind since birth, and in some ways, this limits how she interacts with the people around her. A lot of people are afraid of the blind, she explains. When you meet them in person, there are barriers. But in connecting with many of the same people on Facebook, she can push through these barriers. Facebook lets me control the narrative and break down some of the stigma and show people who I am, she says. It can change hearts and minds. It can make people like mewho are scarymore real and more human.

Lorenzuses Facebook through an iPhone and a tool called Voiceover,which converts text into spoken words. Its not a perfect arrangementFacebook photos are typically identified only with the word photobut in letting her read and write on the social network, Voiceover and other tools provide a wonderfully immediate way to interact with people both near and far.

I can ask other parents about a playdate or a repair man or a babysitter, just like anyone else would, says Lorenz, the executive director of the Independent Living Resource Center, a non-profit that supports people with disabilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Blindness becomes irrelevant in situations like that.

Lorenz is one of about 50,000 people who actively use Facebook through Apple Voiceover. No doubt, many more use it through additional text-to-speech tools. And tens of thousands of otherspeople who are deaf, or cant use computer keyboards or mice or touch screensuse the social network in ways that most of its 1.3 billion users do not. They use closed captioning, mouth-controlled joysticks, and other toolssome built into Facebook, some that plug into Facebook from the outside.

So many people are using the social network through such tools, Facebook now employs a team of thinkers dedicated to ensuring they work as well as possible. We wanted to build empathy into our engineering, says Jeff Wieland, who helps oversee this effort.

He calls it the Facebook Accessibility team, and its a vital thing. Not all online services are well suited to people with disabilities. Google is really lousy, says Lorenz, explaining that she can use Gmail but not Google Docs or Google Calendar. And as a service like Facebook evolveswith engineers changing things on an almost daily basisthey consistently run the risk of undermining Voiceover and other alternative means of using the social network.

Tech companies have long worked to ensure their software and services can be used by people with disabilities. Ramya Sethuraman, who helps drive Facebooks effort, worked on similar issues with old-school software at IBM. But in the modern age, where so many services change from day to day, this requires a greater diligence.

As Sethuraman points out, other companies are tackling these issues in ways similar to Facebook, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and eBay, and for Lorenz, the improvement is apparent. The industry is becoming more conscious about these things, she says, and very slowly, its getting better.

The task is certainly more difficult in the modern age. But at the same time, the possibilities are greater. And the stakes are higher. There are more people with disabilities than ever before. People are living longer. People are more likely to survive accidents, says Adriana Mallozzi, who has cerebral palsy, typically uses Facebook and other services through a joystick she can control with her mouth, and serves as a kind of tech consultant for people with disabilities in the Boston area. Companies have to take this into consideration.

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Meet the Team That Makes It Possible for the Blind to Use Facebook