Comments on: Accessible Twitter

By: Rodger Arslanian

Rodger Arslanian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:44:25 +0000

By far the most concise and up to date information I found on this topic. Sure glad that I navigated to your page by accident. I’ll be subscribing to your feed so that I can get the latest updates. Appreciate all the information here

By: QBasic

QBasic — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:27:04 +0000

Really useful. This article will help me a lot. Thank you.

By: avionic

avionic — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:42:27 +0000

This is one reason why I dont trust newbies from the Social networking market.Facebook and orkut,there that should do

By: The Agra Indian

The Agra Indian — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:20:21 +0000

Keyboard shortcuts are prime concern as most of the people in the word are running out of time and mouse click take more time the keyboard shortcuts as users are friendlier with the keyboard.

While writing some text using keyboard if you have to access a link then mouse is more time consuming and just pressing a key combination is little bit more time saving.

By: Logica Uspeha

Logica Uspeha — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:05:26 +0000

Wow, Nick!
Thanks for items.
I think that Twitter has done a big work in order to make itself better!

By: amy_hess

amy_hess — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:55:44 +0000

I am a tech integrator for a school district, and I am working with teachers who are learning accessibility possibilities for a blind first grader. I am hoping that the internet will become more accessible for her over time. Your post helped me to see what kinds of considerations we need to be aware of in all applications that we integrate into our classrooms. Thanks!

By: Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:10:49 +0000

No harm, no foul – there are so many sides to accessibility and many people forget the less obvious ones because screen reader accessibility is the most discussed and most obvious. Aside from screen readers and low vision users there’s mouse only users, keyboard only users, switch users, speech input users, deaf users, hearing impaired users, deafblind users, dyslexic users, mobility impaired users, and many more. Ahem, can you tell that I blog about accessibility as well as living it?

By: Mike Henderson

Mike Henderson — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:56:31 +0000

Thanks Rick,

I completely forgot about text size. Sometimes it just takes another look.

By: Ricky Buchanan

Ricky Buchanan — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:30:48 +0000

Mike, I’m a Twitter user with low vision so I need a really large font size to be comfortable reading text. And by “really large” I mean in the 100+ point size range. I still have sufficient vision that it’s far better for me to use text than audio to access most computer things, but I have to enlarge stuff.

I’m sure you can imagine what happens to 128pt text on a layout like Twitter.com’s default – it ends up with the display showing only 1-2 words per line and therefore being many many screens long. If the width could be specified in terms of em/ex values so the width increased when users increased the font size, this would solve the problem I’m having.

As it is I use Firefox with Stylish usually, so I’ve just told it to remove all Twitter.com’s style sheets and use my own generic style sheet to set the text out the way suits me best. It works for me, but that’s pretty advanced stuff in terms of your “average user”. It’s not a solution that an average user could – or should have to – implement.

I have been very enthusiastically testing out AccessibleTwitter every few days to see the improvements occurring. It’s developing really well and is usable for all the basic stuff now which is fantastic!

By: Mike Henderson

Mike Henderson — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:09:09 +0000

I disagree with: “Layout width is static not flexible; doesn’t “stretch” with browser width”

I think Twitter’s fixed width works quite well with Typography/Usability issues. Short multiple line paragraphs are lots easier to read. Could you imagine a browser window displaying Twitter at 1500px wide with a fluid or elastic layout? Each tweet would be in a single line, would be harder to read, and a lot of wasted white space. (I just tried this with Twitterific and over 2/3 of the space was white/wasted space)

I guess I’m confused on how browser width fits into accessibility.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:36:07 +0000

Sounds like a great idea, although I’ve never really heard these complaints about twitter before.

By: Web Standards, Accessibility and Other Stuff » Blog Archive » Twitter and Web Accessibility

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:15:03 +0000

[...] issue with the site is that Twitter is not web accessible. I’ve recently been resolving this problem by writing a new web application Accessible [...]

By: Web Axe

Web Axe — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:59:22 +0000

Great article. Accessible Twitter really fixes these accessibility issues…can’t wait to see Beta!

By: Bob Hodapp

Bob Hodapp — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:46:47 +0000

Twitter also restrictions names to 20 characters, this means that many people in the rest of the world, especially those with name Christopher won’t be able to even identify themselves on twitter.

Too bad Twitter doesn’t care about accessibility, internationalization and the rest of the world.

By: TimN

TimN — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:16:45 +0000

Thanks for bringing this up. Twitter’s lack of keyboard access — as well as reduced usability on mobile devices — has bugged me for a while. One of our student bloggers is legally blind, and how she navigates the faulty poorly designed hodgepodge we call the Web so well amazes me. I think of her and many people with accessibility as real go-getters who impress the heck out of me … it’s Web designers who don’t think of accessibility who are decidedly less impressive.