A couple of days ago, Twitter announced that they would be rolling out a new feature in the form of audio tweets. Similar to how people send voice messages, audio tweets would basically let people record their voice and upload it as a tweet, giving users more ways to express themselves that the written word might not.
However, it seems that one of the features that Twitter might have forgotten about is accessibility, where they are working under the assumption that all their users have no hearing impairments. As pointed out by one of their users, the lack of closed captions means that those who are hard on hearing might have issues trying to listen to these audio tweets.
The good news is that Twitter has since acknowledged the lack of accessibility and has stated that they are exploring ways to make such tweets more accessible to more users in the future. The company also notes that because this is an early version, not all features are available yet, but that could change in the future.
Hey Matthew, this is an early version of this feature and we’re exploring ways to make these types of Tweets accessible to everyone.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) June 17, 2020
We’re not sure when accessibility will come to audio tweets, but it might be something to look out for in the future. To Twitter’s credit, audio tweets still appears to be rather limited where for now, it is only available to a limited group of users and only available on iOS.
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