Twitter has announced that it is introducing two new teams, the Accessibility Center of Excellence and the Experience Accessibility Team to make its platform more accessible.
The social media company states that it realized after testing Voice Tweets earlier this summer, that it still needs to do more work in terms of making the platform more inclusive for the disabled community. To fulfill the purpose, it has created the two new teams. Both the teams will specifically focus on the features and products on Twitter.
According to Twitter, its Accessibility Center for Excellence team will be responsible to set goals, drive progress, and consult and partner with groups across Twitter's core business functions to help make aspects of the company more accessible, including Twitter's office space, marketing and communication strategies, legal and policy standards, and other areas.
The Experience Accessibility Team, on the other hand will work on both Twitter's new and existing products and features to promote greater accessibility on the service. Moreover, this team will work with the Accessibility Center for Excellence to ensure accountability in identifying and filling accessibility gaps throughout the product development lifecycle.
In addition to the creation of new teams, Twitter also announced that it is working on adding automated captions to audio and video by early 2021. This move, according to Twitter, will be the foundation for a ''longer-term roadmap'' dedicated to media accessibility across Twitter's platform.
Twitter has also partnered with groups to gather feedback from people with disabilities via interviews, surveys, and remote usability studies of new prototypes. Meanwhile, the company will be working on its testing for new media features.
While Twitter is proud of the progress it has made in terms of accessibility, it also realizes the need to put in more work to make its platform even more accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities.
