That Chip Guy
Hannah Kolbeck 🏳️⚧️If anyone knows a journalist that might be interested in a story on musk's gating the Twitter API and its effect on accessibility on Twitter, I'd love to talk to them. The rallying cry is currently #SaveA11yBots
Please boost 💜
Steve Sawczyn@hannah It's a tough one for sure. The native clients, and to a lesser degree the site are pretty accessible though. Lots of reasons not to like them, but I struggle with the accessibility one. All that said, I know it will eventually break and that's where the danger com'es in IMO.
Amanda Carson@SteveSawczyn @hannah The tricky thing about all this is that while there's been a ton of accessibility work on the app and website, there are still places where they really fall over from that standpoint, and none of it is the fault of Twitter's now non-existent accessibility team. For example, try to deal with a fast-moving hashtag, or try to work with lists. It's fine if you deal with home and mentions/DMs on one account. But once you start digging in things +
@SteveSawczyn @hannah It's a lot of having to go around your elbow to get to your foot mostly, which is technically a UI problem but those kinds of things have a huge impact.
@hannah @arush See that's why I struggle so much with discussions around Twitter and accessibility. Personally, I don't like the client, I am not a huge fan of the site. I think the UI could be made vastly more efficient. but I don't really consider that an accessibility issue. I may be jaded though as I deal with lots of accessibility complaints for things that fall into the category of "I don't like this so it must not be accessible."
@SteveSawczyn @hannah I'm specifically referring to the very subjective bit of accessibility that's concerned with ease of use from the point of users. I hear you on the I-don't-like-so-not-accessible complaints, but I think I see a lot of the inverse where something is technically speaking more accessible and as a result more of a nightmare to use. So I guess I should technically say useability here.
@hannah @arush Oh i definitely know where you're coming from. There are so so many reasons why restricting the Twitter API is bad and accessibility factors into that, but the former Twitter accessibility team really did do a great job and as a result, we have a pretty accessible experience ... for now. UX could definitely be improved, but because of that team's work, it's difficult to argue that restricting API has had a major accessibility impact, at least not yet. '
@SteveSawczyn @hannah That was the abbreviation I was looking for. UX. I can't believe my brain shorted out on that good God every day I'm saying something to someone about UX for work.
@SteveSawczyn @hannah I don't think it has an impact on the app/website itself, but where there will be an impact very quickly is on things like reminder bots or bots/services used to do things like make threads readable and/or are an alt for services presenting their info inaccessibly. So sort of meta accessibility stuff. Is meta accessibility even a thing because if it's not it should be.
@SteveSawczyn @hannah get flaky, and this is to say nothing of the inevitable that's already happening when there's not an accessibility team to help manage regressions/contribute hotfixes.
David BenjaminI cannot offer definitive "proof" other than the statement:
"Twitter has been throttling my account for weeks, sometimes backlogging tweets for hours until posting, if ever."
hikewithrichard@hannah back in the day we called this a silo. FB did this too. I want people to remember the term.
Robert Stribley@hannah Did you ever find folks interested in covering this? I write often on Medium about UX and related issues, so if you’d like to share a few thoughts, let me know.