Twitter is finally addressing criticisms around its accessibility features. The company has created two new teams that will focus on ensuring its capabilities are inclusive for all, including persons with disabilities.
The Accessibility Center for Excellence is tasked to make every aspect of Twitter "more accessible". That includes office spaces, marketing, legal, and policy standards, among others. The group will set goals, manage progress, make consultations, and collaborate with groups across the company to improve accessibility for those aspects.
Meanwhile, the Experience Accessibility Team will work to develop resources and tools meant to make new and existing products more accessible to all users. Twitter drew flak after recently unveiling an experimental feature, which allows attaching voice recording to tweets, because it did not factor in accessibility tools for disabled individuals. Twitter says it is already working to introduce automated captions to audio and video by early 2021.
Over the next few months, Twitter plans to gather feedback from persons with disabilities through interviews and surveys. It will also conduct remote usability studies of new prototypes while testing related media features. The company admits there's still much work to do to make its service accessible.
