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IN TOUCH – How Accessible is X?

TX:Ìý 07.11.2023Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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White

Good evening.Ìý X marks the spot or perhaps not anymore for some visually impaired social media users.Ìý Formerly known as Twitter, many of you have been telling us your concerns about X and its current state of accessibility.Ìý There are many issues to touch upon tonight and we did, of course, invite X on to the programme to address them, we didn’t get a response, which is not entirely surprising, very few people do.

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Ed Markey is a senator representing the state of Massachusetts, and earlier this year, he sent an open letter to Elon Musk, then X’s new owner.Ìý Here’s an extract, it’s being read for us:

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Extract from open letter to Elon Musk from Ed Markey (read)

Twitter has a responsibility to ensure that its platform is open and accessible to disabled users.Ìý Yet you’ve recently eliminated Twitter’s accessibility team which played a crucial role in developing and implementing essential features for Twitter users with disabilities.Ìý Not surprisingly, since you shut down Twitter’s accessibility team disabled users have reportedly increased difficulty and frustration using Twitter and many have already left it entirely.Ìý I urge you to immediately reinstate Twitter’s accessibility team and take all necessary steps to promote accessibility for disabled Twitter users.

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The senator went on to outline in detail a number of the concerns visually impaired listeners will be raising in this programme.Ìý And if he did get a response, precious little has been done to address the points he made.

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One of the people who share these concerns is visually impaired travel and accessibility content creator Sassy Wyatt.

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Wyatt

I now feel that I can’t make any complaints to Twitter about their inaccessibility or if that I do it will not land the same way, things not get dealt with.Ìý I would really like to see that people or anyone within Twitter take accessibility seriously again.Ìý This has not put me off using Twitter in a way of engaging with my community and having fun and I genuinely only really use it for professional purposes now because of that.

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White

Well, to help us tackle this issue and some of your other concerns about X, we’re joined by two Matts – Matt Johnson, who is a blind data protection and privacy lawyer and Matt Eason, who’s a digital accessibility specialist and software developer.

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Matt Johnson, let’s start with you on this.Ìý It does sound pretty obvious why a dedicated accessibility team would be so important but just spell out the implications of it no longer existing.

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Johnson

There are a couple of points there.Ìý The first is that accessibility is often its own discipline.Ìý A lot of mainstream, shall we say, developers don’t train in creating services and websites etc., in a manner that is accessible, it’s not an integral part of their training in most contexts and so you do need a team that very specifically goes through and checks and gets actual people with various disabilities to verify that a given service is or isn’t accessible.Ìý But there are two reasons why the forced departure of the accessibility team is important, at least in my view.Ìý The first is that over time things break, right, changes to the code, changes to the web interface in general and how the internet evolves means that over time these accessibility things that the team used to have in place will start to fail and we’re starting to see that now in a couple of ways that I think you’re going to get into in a minute.

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White

Yeah.

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Johnson

But the second way is just as important, perhaps more so and that is that when one company, who has a leader as influential as Elon Musk very publicly dispenses with the accessibility team, the message that that is sending out to companies of a similar kind and smaller companies is that accessibility is something that is no longer needed.Ìý And the fact that this public step was taken is very much an indicator that – oh well, it’s fine, you know what, it doesn’t really matter – others will follow that lead if they haven’t already.

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White

Right.Ìý Now the disability charity Sense recently brought it to our attention that some external links that are shared to the platform have become difficult to interpret with some screen readers.

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Blackmore

My name’s Emma Blackmore, I’m deafblind.Ìý I work for the charity Sense and I use Twitter/X mainly for connecting with other people in the disabled community for work and I also use it for a lot of stuff that I volunteer with.Ìý The main issue that I’m having with X at the moment is links not being able to show what they are before you click them.Ìý Basically, it is just a link, so usually it will come up, say a newspaper had an article about an accident on the motorway, or something like that, it would say what’s on the actual article above it, so a screen reader could pick up what’s actually in the article.Ìý If it was to be a scam, we wouldn’t be able to tell what it was because screen readers just don’t pick up what’s actually on the link.Ìý And it doesn’t seem to be taken seriously that people can’t see or a screen reader can’t pick it up and it is an issue because a lot of people, who are disabled or visually impaired, anything, connect a lot with disabled people on the internet and I feel that shouldn’t be took away from us.

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White

Matt Eason, I mean, we’ve heard that explained quite well but I wonder can you just spell out a bit more about what are actually people missing now?

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Eason

This was kind of fallout from a broader change that X decided to make to how links are displayed for sighted users as well.Ìý So, before when you linked to the website you used to get a large image and then you would get the headlines below the sight of the article and then you’d get the name of the website below that, so that you knew that the article was about, you knew where it was going and then if you were sighted you would be able to see a preview image to show what it was about.Ìý And they decided to change that to hide the headline.Ìý So, basically, all you get now is an image and the domain of the website that you’re going to.

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White

Why would they do that, Matt?

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Eason

So, there were a couple of theories for it.Ìý There’s was one that it was to make it so that people didn’t visit external links as much and they want publishers posting content on X directly, as kind of long form tweets rather than on their websites and so they want to keep people, kind of, within that walled garden.Ìý The other kind of stated reason for it, that I think Elon Musk mentioned as well, was that just aesthetically they think it looks nicer, they think it looks less cluttered.Ìý They seem to be determined to continue on with that, as well, they’re talking about getting rid of the icons underneath a tweet that show how many times it’s been retweeted or replied to.Ìý They’re stripping back a lot from what gets shown on the timeline.

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White

Right.Ìý But I suppose, in a way, they can’t be blamed for wanting to keep people on their platform, rather than them being lured away to look at something else?

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Eason

Yeah, absolutely but what is going to happen with those links is that publishers are just going to start adding headlines to the images, rather than Twitter providing the headline text underneath them.Ìý But the fallout from that for visually impaired users who use screen readers, nothing would get announced at all unless someone said in the tweets – I’m linking to this article – you wouldn’t know that you were missing out on anything, it would just skip right over it.

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White

Right.Ìý And I understand you’ve been speaking to a software engineer, who currently still works at X, about this problem.Ìý We did invite him on but he didn’t feel it was appropriate, which is perhaps understandable as he still works there.Ìý So, what happened?

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Eason

So, I posted about this change that was made that was inaccessible, it happened to go viral, luck of the draw that my post back happened to go viral and it eventually reached this engineer at Twitter who was, you know, very apologetic and understanding and I don’t blame the individual engineers for this, it’s obviously a leadership problem and a cultural problem.Ìý So, he kind of took on the task of making it accessible again on the web and we had a little bit of back and forth trying to get it right.Ìý And now I think the state of play is that on the web, those links are accessible, somebody using a screen reader may well have a better experience than someone navigating visually because the headline will now get read out for them.Ìý It still appears to be broken on the mobile apps, which is unfortunate.Ìý I think, you know, app updates are always a little bit lagging behind updates to the web because they have to go through the app store approval process and that kind of thing.Ìý So, hopefully, that’s coming soon but, you know, as Sassy said there’s no control accessibility team that is monitoring this kind of stuff and making sure that it’s synchronised and coordinated, it’s a little bit ad hoc.

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White

Right.Ìý Matt Johnson, one of the other concerns was a change in how X interacts with third party apps.Ìý Now, again, I’m going to need your indulgence for the technologically challenged here but if you can put in fairly simple terms what is a third-party app and how is it used by blind people to access X?

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Johnson

Let me use a slightly technically imperfect comparison but it will help illustrate the point.Ìý Now if you receive an email from Gmail, you can choose to receive that in Outlook, in Thunderbird or on the web interface at Gmail itself, among many other possibilities and third-party apps are, essentially, the Outlook and the Thunderbird, they allow you to choose the set of tools that best work for you.Ìý And, of course, one of those tools is accessibility, right, you’re going to choose a client that is the most accessible to you or perhaps that was custom designed with accessibility in mind, which was the case for a lot of the Twitter third-party apps that were used on Windows and Mac over the years.Ìý And what Twitter, now X, has effectively done is completely dispensed with the right to use their third-party interfaces, where they’re called the APIs.Ìý So, what that means is that without paying hefty fees third party applications cannot at all interact with the X service in a sort of efficient way which would enable things like accessibility.Ìý It’s not the only things they enable, by the way, but for our purposes it is the most important.

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White

And so, is anybody reacting to this at X?

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Johnson

Yes.Ìý At X they’re not.Ìý What I will say is that it has commenced a bit of a trend.Ìý We then saw Reddit do something very, very similar soon after.Ìý And this speaks to my point about one company that sort of leads the charge in a particular area and what that effectively means is that interoperability is reduced and thereby accessibility is often reduced.Ìý It doesn’t have to be but it is in real terms.

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White

I mean, Matt Eason has this kind of thing and the experience you were talking about just now, has that put you off developing software and workarounds?

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Eason

Yeah, I mean, I was lucky with the link change that I was able to do something kind off the Twitter platform that affected stuff on Twitter.Ìý But the API changes really affected how I interact with Twitter a lot.Ìý I used to build a fair number of bots to help out with stuff on Twitter, for example I built a bot that monitored every UK government account and every Twitter account of members of the cabinet and kind of senior people in government and checked if they were posting images without alt text because their government communications are legally required to be accessible and if not it tweets it out a little message saying – this image doesn’t have alt text – and then some links to guidance on how to add it.Ìý And so, that kind of access that we had for the API to build those kinds of applications was really useful and it was free and then that rug kind of got pulled out from underneath us and now if you want to post anything on Twitter via the API that costs a minimum $100 per month for kind of fairly meagre limits and then if you want anything beyond that it goes up to $5,000 per month.Ìý And just as a kind of hobbyist developer trying to build stuff [indistinct word] that’s just completely infeasible for us.

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White

Right.Ìý Well, we have spoken so far about the various problems with X but we’ve also been told by quite a lot of blind users that they’ve not had any problems recently, some even think that accessibility isn’t the issue here.

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Cooper

I’m Matt Cooper.Ìý I use Twitter/X on a daily basis.Ìý Things have broken on Twitter or X but it isn’t really anything to do with accessibility, the things that have broken have been more to do with the general experience of Twitter.Ìý You find that a lot of people, sighted or not, have plenty of complaints about how the service has gone.Ìý A lot of the complaints people seem to have seems to be more to do with the lack of a chronological timeline and that they have to look at ads but half the reason that third party support was removed was because most of third-party apps didn’t pass ads to the consumer, to the user.Ìý So, why should we, as blind people, get a better experience, surely we should get the same experience as everybody else.Ìý Getting rid of the accessibility team might annoy people and it might feel like Twitter isn’t focused on accessibility anymore but Facebook and plenty of other big tech organisations do have accessibility teams and seems to be going backwards with accessibility.Ìý So, why is it that we think that Twitter somehow getting rid of their accessibility team is going to be any worse than an app that still has an accessibility team and things keep getting progressively worse with it?Ìý I think people confuse accessibility with convenience.Ìý Just because an app is clunky or the user interface isn’t quite what we would want doesn’t mean it’s inaccessible, it just means it’s clunky.Ìý And that experience is the same for people who have vision just as it for us.

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White

Matt Johnson, your thoughts on that.Ìý I mean yet another Matt, Matt Cooper, is saying this is a problem for everyone and the implication seems to be that if it’s a problem for everyone it’s not really an accessible issue.

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Johnson

So, I don’t 100% disagree with that.Ìý There is a point at which Twitter is serving more ads and is something that affects blind and not blind people equally.Ìý But what I would say about that is, firstly, there’s a difference between a sighted person scrolling past an ad and a blind person scrolling past an ad, there is much more of work involved if you are visually impaired.Ìý I’m not saying that we should be excluded from being shown ads, we should be in the same position as everyone else.Ìý Matt mentioned the fact that, for example, other apps have accessibility teams, well, I think, firstly, that that is a bit of a slippery slope because obviously we’re going from accessibility teams who are ineffective to dispensing with those accessibility teams altogether and that is definitely not a step in the right direction.Ìý I disagree that the ineffectiveness of one service’s team should have a direct connection to the fact that another service is even worse, that’s not how we should be doing things.Ìý There is an argument around what is accessible and what is usable, I very much disagree that they are the same thing, they are not at all the same thing.Ìý Anyone who has used Microsoft Teams knows that it’s accessible but it’s far from usable.Ìý And regarding the API changes and the fact that APIs didn’t serve ads to the third-party apps, I agree that that is a problem and that’s the same reason Reddit killed its API but eventually, after much, much cajoling and articles and etc., Reddit did agree to allow an exception, effectively, for those apps that were very strictly focused on disability and enabling access to the platform.Ìý Why Twitter didn’t do that is because they don’t care and that’s a very active choice.

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White

You’ve been telling us for a while on this programme that’s what’s needed when it comes to access to the web and social media is legislation, can you just explain, especially in this context?Ìý I mean there is some web related legislation in the States, doesn’t that cover the kind of changes X has been making?

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Johnson

It’s a great question.Ìý I’m not a US based accessibility expert.Ìý My immediate hunch is that it potentially does extend to cover those things…

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White

But nobody’s tried to use it.

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Johnson
No one is testing it, no one is willing to go against Elon Musk in a court of law, they would rather do it in the court of public opinion.Ìý And on both matrics, we’re not winning.Ìý So, in that context I would say it probably does but it would need to be tested.Ìý But, more importantly, in the UK and the EU, and this is something that multiple publications have erroneously claimed that accessibility laws do exist in the UK and the EU for websites, they almost certainly do not.Ìý There’s an argument around the Equality Act and its applicability to this situation but apart from government websites in the UK, where specific regulations do cover access needs and are oft times ignored, the Equality Act, in terms of its relation to web accessibility in private businesses, almost certainly does not cover it and again, it would need to be a very established legal precedent which would cost a lot to do, to prove that it did something even better.

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White

Yeah because it hasn’t… it hasn’t been much tested….

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Johnson

It hasn’t been… it has not been tested and what I will state unequivocally from conversations I’ve had with other people who wish to test it and other law firms who have been approached is that there are many law firms and many lawyers who do this kind of work, even pro bono, who have been unwilling to take that on because of the lack of certainty around, you know, winning it, the probability of winning it is low due to the state of law.Ìý So, what we need in this country is an actual accessibility framework and it needs to have teeth.

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White

Matt Johnson, Matt Eason, thank you both very much indeed.

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And that’s all for today.Ìý Do let us know about your experiences of using social media – how accessible do you find it and have you found more accessible alternatives to certain platforms.Ìý Let us know. You can email intouch@bbc.co.uk, you can leave us a voicemail on 0161 8361338 or you can go to our website that’s bbc.co.uk/intouch.Ìý

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From me, Peter White and producer, Beth Hemmings, goodbye.