Twitter announces a new feature is rolling out for iOS, the ability to record audio tweets. It demonstrates this with an uncaptioned video of its Twitter avatar making bird noises:
Tweets with audio are rolling out on iOS and we only have one thing to say about it pic.twitter.com/CZvQC1fo1W
Twitter’s support account acknowledges it is inaccessible and seemingly alludes to a lack of plan to address it:
This is an early version of this feature. Making these types of Tweets accessible to everyone is important and we’re exploring ways to make that happen.
Twitter’s dedicated accessibility account has not tweeted anything about it. In fact, its last tweet was on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, three weeks prior to this new feature being launched.
Adding descriptions to images is a great way to include everyone in your conversation. These descriptions, aka alt-text, enable folks who use screen readers to interpret images in Tweets. Starting today, you no longer need a setting to add alt text and it's available on 📱 & 💻. pic.twitter.com/wRDJZwSihL
Twitter Able? Nothing since June 11.
The project lead is proud and, based on the team involvement, rightly so for getting solid representation.
Voice Tweets made my timeline fun today. This is a great example of allowing a team to chase after a customer problem and use their gut. Designers, PM, Eng, and Research worked in lock step and mgmt got out of the fucking way. Congrats to the team! 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Users rightly excoriate Twitter for failing to include any accessibility affordances with this new feature.
So basically @Twitter created a new feature, did not consult with @TwitterA11y or @TwitterAble, and their excuse for it being inaccessible is that it's new. And that they are working out ways to implement accessible features *after* the fact, which- after is already too late.
No. This is not how we do things. We do not release entire new features on a MASSIVE platform (whether we're "testing" them or not) without even a workaround to make them accessible.
[Quote tweeted audio: Testing. 1, 2, 1, 2. Mic check. Is this thing on? Tweet with your voice.] twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/12733…
If you are not prepared to use your tweet as the transcript of your audio clip, then do not do it. twitter.com/Twitter/status/127331…
And shame on @TwitterA11y for not getting ahead of this and insisting there be some form of captioning. pic.twitter.com/PgsCmgm0wm
You've proven that failure to prioritise accessibility (and use resources like @arhayward) has serious consequences, and learned that you've given people a tool to exclude Deaf people from your platform.
You HAVE captioning, but it's locked away in studio behind ads accounts.
I don't know who needs to read this but I have never wanted to hear a voice tweet and will never listen to them. Also, how long until the twitter app backdoors autoplay on these and then buries option to control in "accessibility" options? Also also, this idea #SUX.
This Time, Twitter has excluded those who are D/deaf, have auditory processing differences, or — like me — prefer text because it's faster and less distracting. Design that excludes any of us harms us all by making the platform less usable, therefore less diverse and valuable.
Really excited for Twitter to become even less accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people with this voice notes feature. Love that for us.
Hello, new tech feature, let's do a speculative harm analysis to consider ways that terrible people might use you (and maybe what could be done about it?): a thread. twitter.com/Twitter/status/12733…
As a deaf Twitter user: I vote no against voice tweets.
Plus, you know that voices have unique signatures (certainly of interest as we wear masks that make traditional modes of surveillance harder)? You’re handing that data over when you use voice tweets.
After many people called Twitter out for deploying this feature, the project lead repeatedly argues that this is an experiment. An experiment they felt must be shipped immediately instead of in a year to build the accessibility. And yes, the second tweet of this set has been deleted since I wrote this post.
We formed a design systems team recently that is responsible for accessibility across Twitter. This is a test. Hypothetically a test can go away in a few weeks after we launch. The work you’re describing is important. However that would have meant shipping in 2021/22.
@dj_diabeatic This is fair feedback. We weren’t even sure how people would use the feature once in the world. Adding captioning of UGC isn’t trivial for us given our tech stack. We wanted to prove the concept and learn before investing into what is essentially a test.
Feedback heard. This is an incomplete product in many ways because it’s an experiment. We want to see if people enjoy using it, then we’ll learn, and iterate. If we included all the things asked of us, we would not ship for another year. 2 wks after we may learn no one uses it.
Here’s where all of that falls down. Nobody appears to have requested this feature. In fact, you can do it today by recording a video on your iOS device and keeping your thumb over the camera lens. Arguably, the only new part of this experiment is an animated avatar instead of a black screen.
This was built as if it was an MVP from a start-up. Twitter is not a start-up. Its user base, net worth, geo-political influence, all tell us this is a mature business, if only by age and mass. Yet it continues to behave like a start-up.
In a mature business, you go back and fix broken code, enhance existing features. You deploy new features based on requests, market research, and competitive analysis.
Twitter could have deployed this same feature by adding a “disable camera” or “audio only” button to its video recording feature in the iOS app. That is an MVP. It likely requires far less code and can be rolled out quietly, without all the fanfare of a new feature and its accompanying scrutiny. I suspect adding the avatar and the surrounding animation would have been trivial.
Then that team could have moved on to working with the speech API built into iOS or Android, making it possible to auto-generate captions from voice recognition software already on the phone, giving the user the ability to correct it.
That, in my opinion, would have been a far better use of their time. It would have given them a quick-hit project to test the waters, while going full-steam toward supporting a significant feature that currently leaves video on Twitter limited to those who are able to listen.
None of this speaks to the potential abuse, of course. Twitter’s algorithms for identifying hate speech lean on parsing text. There is likely some image recognition in there. But have they stood up any process to parse audio?
If I report an audio tweet because I feel someone is at risk of self-harm, or there is hate speech, or targeted harassment, does Twitter have the human capacity to listen to all of them?
I’ll close with Chancey’s tweet, which came in just before I hit the button to publish.
Tech industry culture overwhelmingly values fast deployment above inclusive, accountable development. I know it's hard to be the person in the meeting who demands to name & stop encoded bias. But if you're listening — we need you to be that voice in the room when we aren't there.
If you are generally interested in making your tweets more accessible, I gathered some tips under an obvious post name: Improving Your Tweet Accessibility
