Twitter and Inaccessible “Voice Notes”

I am so <bleeping> over apologies from companies for ableist behavior.

Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash

Authors note: Because of Medium’s refusal to address its accessibility issues for both authors and readers, I’ve moved my last three years of blogs to Substack. Please sign up there for notices of all new articles. Also, I will be updating older articles (like this one) and the updates will only be published on Substack. Thank you for your continued readership and support.

Once upon a time (in tech, this is maybe 2–3 years ago), Twitter actually cared about accessibility. For a while, they were the preferred social media platform for people with disabilities, primarily because their framework functioned well with screen readers, and competing social media was awful.

But their competitors started to improve. Pinterest is accessible now, and Facebook and LinkedIn are less terrible than they used to be. And somehow either through intent or attrition, Twitter lost its permanent accessibility team, and started relying on “volunteers.” And the volunteers weren’t involved when Twitter made the inexplicable decision last week to release a new feature that was completely unusable by people with hearing loss.

“The volunteers behind accessibility at Twitter (there is no formal team) strive to do their best to ensure products are shipped appropriately,” wrote Andrew Hayward.

To which I mentally replied: Are you seriously kidding me? In what way is this an acceptable strategy?

1. How is the voice of a volunteer group within a corporation going to be able to fight against the business demands to push out inaccessible software?
2. How is an organization as large as Twitter going to attract and, more importantly, RETAIN employees with disabilities without a formal accessibility program?

Twitter followed the standard corporate ableist practice cookbook throughout this entire incident.

Ingredient #1 — Silence

First, there was silence. Because pretending that you haven’t behaved in a discriminatory manner always makes the problem go away, amiright?

Ingredient #2 — Complaint goes viral…