Twitter+and+Accessibility

= Twitter and Accessibility = By Lori Jones

Twitter is a popular social networking tool that allows users to send a short, mostly text-based message up to 140 characters long known as a ‘tweet’. These tweets are then published online and can be publicly viewed. Twitter users can post their own tweets, follow the tweets of other users or contribute to a wider online discussion based on a particular topic or event.Twitter is also commonly referred to as a ‘microblogging’ tool, a term that indicates Twitter is a short web log (blog).

Twitter is all about fast personal communication. People who tweet generally want to share their thoughts on something with others. Sometimes this can be small personal insights shared with people who follow your tweets, while at other times you may want to share your thoughts on a larger event. Examples of Twitter use include following a celebrity, giving feedback on a real-time event such as a live television show or presentation, passing on information about something of interest such as a party to your followers or sharing your experience of a major event such as a natural disaster. Another popular use for Twitter is as an information resource – you can ask questions online about particular issues and be answered quickly.

For people with disabilities, Twitter can be a great way to seek disability-specific information on how to overcome potential issues or to provide support through shared experience. Twitter can also be used to unite with others in the form of a protest or as a mechanism to receive quick answers to particular issues. Given its relative anonymity, many people with disabilities feel comfortable asking questions through the medium knowing that the user can control how much of their identity is revealed to others. Twitter can also be a useful tool for quickly sending a short message to organizations that support people with disabilities. Here’s a quick tour of the most common Twitter features:
 * Tweet: a message sent on Twitter that is up to 140 characters in length.
 * Followers: people who have requested to have your tweets sent to them.
 * Hashtag (#): this allows you to tweet on a popular Twitter topic by including a particular word preceded by the ‘#’ symbol, such as ‘#weather’.
 * Retweet (RT): forwarding another user’s tweet to your followers.

If you are unable to use the main Twitter website due to accessibility issues, you may want to try using the Easy Chirp website www.easychirp.com. This website operates in a similar way to the main Twitter website but provides a more consistent layout, good keyboard navigation and better support for assistive technologies such as screen readers. Easy Chirp also has the added benefit of making it easier to add alternative text to images. Easy Chirp was nominated for the 2016 Blindness Accessibility Award for exhibiting the site content in accordance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. These guidelines that are organized under four foundational principles, which conveniently form the acronym POUR: Some of the features that make Easy Chirp more user friendly for the disabled are audio cues sound when you type in a tweet. As the number of characters you have left dwindles, the website simply tells you how many are left. The text can be increased to extra-large, there is a light and dark contrast feature for those with limited vision and when you complete an action such as following or unfollowing someone, a helpful alert message is displayed to let you know. The Accessible Twitter also features a fully keyboard accessible; marked up semantically with headings optimized for screen reader users, and; fully functional with JavaScript disabled.
 * ** Perceivable ** : Information and user interface components must be presented to users in ways they can see or hear.
 * ** Operable: ** User interface components and navigation must be designed so that users can interact with them and they can support assistive technologies such as screen readers.
 * ** Understandable: ** Information and the operation of user interface must communicate clearly and consistently so that the content is readable.
 * ** Robust: ** Content must be written so that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

Twitter also features several popular accessibility discussions by using the #a11y and #axs hashtags and participate in broader disability discussion using #disability. Beyond this, if you like to keep track of a large amount of Twitter information often use Windows applications. There are two accessible recommendations that include Chicken Nugget: Twitter client and TheQube designed specifically for blind users.