After several rounds of layoffs, Twitter’s staff is down from about 7,500 employees to less than 2,000 — and one of the numerous cuts across the company eliminated the platform’s entire accessibility team last year.
In an open letter to Elon Musk, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) called on the new Twitter owner to bring the accessibility team back.
“Not surprisingly, since you shut down Twitter’s Accessibility Team, disabled users have reported increased difficulty and frustration using Twitter,” Markey wrote.
Like any social platform, Twitter has had its foibles when it comes to accessibility — in 2020, Twitter didn’t even have an accessibility team and only established one after public outcry when the company rolled out voice tweets without captions. But in the few years Twitter did have an accessibility team, the company rolled out features for alt text on images, automatic captioning on videos and captions for Spaces live audio rooms and voice tweets. Many disabled users found community on Twitter, because its built-in accessibility features made it easier to use than other social platforms.
With no accessibility team at Twitter anymore, it’s not as though the platform’s features have simply remained dormant. Captions on Twitter Spaces have disappeared altogether, making the feature unusable for any user who is deaf or hard of hearing. …
