(Image Credit: raphaelsilva/ Pixabay)
A Twitter developer named Andrew Hayward has brought a Twitter issue towards wider attention: the social media platform doesn’t have an accessibility team. For a social network company that has 4,000 employees (which means that it is big enough to create teams), it is a bit disappointing that Twitter doesn’t have a team dedicated to accessibility.
This is not to say that Twitter is a wasteland for accessibility features, though like any major platform it has a lot of room for improvement. But features that make a site easier for everyone to navigate — not just people who use screen readers or captions — require more than part-time input from concerned employees.
When people criticized Twitter’s new audio tweet feature for not having any kind of captioning, the official Twitter Support account said that it was an “early version of this feature” and that the company would be “exploring” ways to make it accessible, which didn’t help.
Hayward chimed in to say that he and the other “volunteers behind accessibility at Twitter” were “frustrated and disappointed” at the lack of consideration for people with disabilities, prompting astonishment that there is no dedicated team. He clarified that they are paid employees (not outright volunteers) but that “the work we do is notionally on top of our regular roles.” So the work he and everyone else has done has essentially been in their spare time.
It looks like it would be a long time before we see a Twitter that’s user-friendly towards people with disabilities.
By FranzifiedWe're sorry about testing voice Tweets without support for people who are visually impaired, deaf, or hard of hearing. It was a miss to introduce this experiment without this support.— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 19, 2020
Accessibility should not be an afterthought. (1/3) https://t.co/9GRWaHU6fR
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