Accessing a file in another users home directory using setfacl

I was trying to access a file on another users home directory using acl. I have tried to do it the following way. User k9 made a file test.file and ran setfacl -m u:sai:rwx test.file. Following is the getfacl output. k9@xxxx:~$ getfacl test.file # file: test.file # owner: k9 # group: k9 user::rw- user:sai:rwx group::rw- mask::rwx other::r-- And from user sai I tried accessing this file sai@xxxx:~$ ls /home/k9/ ls: cannot open directory '/home/k9/': Permission denied sai@xxxx:~$ ls /home/k9/test.file ls: cannot access '/home/k9/test.file': Permission denied Can we use setfacl to access test.file without having complete access to /home/k9/ ? If so what am I doing wrong and if not how can that be done?