Twitter voice note feature doesn't care about accessibility
Twitter for one is one of the best and my go-to place to know what's happening on the internet and engage in any trending stories that cross my timeline.
Twitter has been a very powerful tool in giving people voices with everything going on in the world and they have been pushing out cool features to better serve the community even though they still haven’t given us the edit feature on tweets.
This year only, they have released various features to restrict people from retweeting your tweets, add tweets to preceding tweets to create longer threads, twitter stories, restrict people from mentioning you, schedule tweets, restrict who can reply to your tweets and so on. All these are cool and very useful features that I find myself using every here and there these days.
However, adding to these cool features, Twitter recently rolled out a new beta features only available on iOS called Voice Note which basically means you can now tweet your voice. Cool and innovative right?
Twitter tweeted on Jun 17, 2020, saying “Tweets with audio are rolling out on iOS and we only have one thing to say about it”
This new feature wowed everyone as you can now tweet your voice and say your mind the way you would love to rather than typing. This feature could make twitter more interesting as people could start a mini-podcast on twitter, hold conversations, and talk about pressing issues rather than typing.
However, Twitter and most people are missing something which is accessibility. The new voice note feature does not come with auto closed captions which basically means it's not accessible to users with hearing disability, vision disability, and other users making use of closed captions.
Nearly a day after the release, lots of users started complaining about the accessibility status of the voice note feature as Twitter does not provide a bare minimum option to make it accessible to users with disabilities.
Haben Girma a Disability Right Lawyer mentioned that Harvard, MIT, and Netflix were all sued for not providing captions and Twitter might the next company as they failed to provide captions to this new feature.
Technically the Voice Note feature is like audio to video converter with a nice animation of the audio bpm/tempo and since its a video, Twitter should be able to provide captions to the audio according to ADA laws for accessible videos.
Americans with Disabilities Act short for ADA a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability in several areas, including employment, transportation, public accommodations, communications, online content, and access to state and local government’ programs and services.
In the U.S., some organizations are required to make their materials accessible. The law states that they must remove barriers to people with disabilities including the services provided online.
The law states that organizations are required to add captions online videos if it will be available to the public. Public entities, like governments, must caption their video content. What’s less clear is whether that obligation also rests with private entities. If it does, it would be because one is a “place of public accommodation,” under the ADA. Such places must remove access barriers to people with disabilities.
So the online video content like YouTube must provide a way to add captions to videos. If you’re uploading videos to YouTube, it doesn’t mean its a must you provide captions manually. They should provide an auto-captioning feature or provide a way to upload captions.
However, looking at the Twitter voice note feature, it does not provide an auto-captioning feature for the audio content and also does not provide a way to add captioning either.
This could open Twitter to ADA lawsuits and could reach thousands of laws dollars if this is taken seriously or a fix rolled out.
source https://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80/twitter-might-face-ada-lawsuit-for-their-new-voice-note-feature-f298fd8cbe03?source=rss-7f00eb9ee674------2
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