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Twitter Enables Voice Tweets on iOS with Transcriptions Extending Accessibility
Welcome to "The Outwrite Podcast". This article is published on www.theoutwrite.com by Varun Singh Rajput.
Twitter has relaunched the voice tweets feature along with transcripts to extend the accessibility. The company announced this experimental voice tweet feature early in June 2020 which had to face criticism over accessibility. The objective was to add a more human touch to the platform by motivating users to tweet voice recording.
The new feature didn’t go as planned in past due to the absence of closed captions which made it less accessible to users with a disability. Civil rights advocates and people with disabilities escalated this irresponsible initiative.
“At least the option of providing closed captions would make this more accessible” Matthew Cortland (Policy Analyst) tweeted. He is one of the first ones to point it out the issue in June 2020. However, Twitter tried to counter stating, ” Hey Matthew, this is an early version of this feature and we’re exploring ways to make these types of Tweets accessible to everyone”.
It seemed like that Twitter made their way out showing this as just an initial stage and modifications are expected. But, Cortland hits back factually which made it even worse for the company.
“The Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into law 30 years ago,” Matthew Cortland said. “Federal law requires accessibility from the start. You don’t, as a matter of civil rights law, get to roll out an inaccessible feature and then, only later, make it accessible.”
Twitter released a statement through a series of tweets,”
We’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. Accessibility should not be an afterthought. We’ve fixed several issues related to vision accessibility, including making voice Tweets identifiable on the timeline and making accessibility improvements to the voice Tweet experience. These updates will be available in a forthcoming iOS release.
We’re already exploring ideas for how we could support manual and auto transcriptions. We’re also looking at how we can build a dedicated group to focus on accessibility, tooling, and advocacy across all products, in partnership with the @TwitterA11y and @TwitterAble teams.
However, Twitter is rolling out voice tweets again after fixing all the issues including transcription for even videos too. For now, it’s only available on iOS devices. The company emphasizes that feedback was taken seriously and corrections have been made to make Twitter more accessible.
Thanks for your time, please share your valuable feedback & comments - our email address is: [email protected].
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By Varun Singh Rajput
5
66 ratings
Welcome to "The Outwrite Podcast". This article is published on www.theoutwrite.com by Varun Singh Rajput.
Twitter has relaunched the voice tweets feature along with transcripts to extend the accessibility. The company announced this experimental voice tweet feature early in June 2020 which had to face criticism over accessibility. The objective was to add a more human touch to the platform by motivating users to tweet voice recording.
The new feature didn’t go as planned in past due to the absence of closed captions which made it less accessible to users with a disability. Civil rights advocates and people with disabilities escalated this irresponsible initiative.
“At least the option of providing closed captions would make this more accessible” Matthew Cortland (Policy Analyst) tweeted. He is one of the first ones to point it out the issue in June 2020. However, Twitter tried to counter stating, ” Hey Matthew, this is an early version of this feature and we’re exploring ways to make these types of Tweets accessible to everyone”.
It seemed like that Twitter made their way out showing this as just an initial stage and modifications are expected. But, Cortland hits back factually which made it even worse for the company.
“The Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into law 30 years ago,” Matthew Cortland said. “Federal law requires accessibility from the start. You don’t, as a matter of civil rights law, get to roll out an inaccessible feature and then, only later, make it accessible.”
Twitter released a statement through a series of tweets,”
We’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. Accessibility should not be an afterthought. We’ve fixed several issues related to vision accessibility, including making voice Tweets identifiable on the timeline and making accessibility improvements to the voice Tweet experience. These updates will be available in a forthcoming iOS release.
We’re already exploring ideas for how we could support manual and auto transcriptions. We’re also looking at how we can build a dedicated group to focus on accessibility, tooling, and advocacy across all products, in partnership with the @TwitterA11y and @TwitterAble teams.
However, Twitter is rolling out voice tweets again after fixing all the issues including transcription for even videos too. For now, it’s only available on iOS devices. The company emphasizes that feedback was taken seriously and corrections have been made to make Twitter more accessible.
Thanks for your time, please share your valuable feedback & comments - our email address is: [email protected].