How to avoid Twitter’s latest accessibility mistakes
In June 2020, disability advocate and blogger Sheri Byrne-Haber wrote about Twitter’s attempt to rely entirely on volunteers for accessibility testing, resulting in a public clamour over the release of an inaccessible voice tweets feature, which could not be used by people with hearing loss.
Since then, an accessibility team has been built in Twitter, and they even scored 100% on the Disability: IN Disability Equality Index survey. Despite this achievement, Twitter recently revoked an update due to complaints from users of headaches and eyestrain.
To avoid similar issues, it is important that every company understand that it is 100% possible to build their websites in a way that will not cause physical harm. For example:
• Animation and multimedia flashing can trigger epileptic seizures. Pseudo-flashing (black and white optical illusions) that don’t actually move but appear to be moving can do the same.
• Font changes and certain contrast can trigger eyestrain and headaches.
• Certain types of motion, such as parallax and optical illusions, can make some people motion sick.
• Include as many people with disabilities as possible on your accessibility team.
• Do an usability testing of major website, mobile app, and documentation changes with as many people with disabilities as possible, making sure to cover the spectrum of each disability.
Furthermore, some of the physical harm can be caused within a second of the first glance – they do not require repetitive or long exposure for the adverse results to occur. While these adverse reactions have a low probability of happening, the best action to take is to construct a website where these issues can be avoided.
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