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Comment by teach | Hacker News Reader

I have an old friend who is blind. The official Twitter client is a LOT less accessible than the one she was using. This change impacts her ability to use Twitter considerably.

And before you start with the "well, she's probably better off" -- she lives in a small rural town. Twitter and Facebook and the like are one of her few connections to a larger world.

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The fact that Elon has disbanded the accessibility team at twitter probably already leads them into hot water related to this (It is not uncommon for orgs like twitter to be bound by multiple long term settlements related to accessibility suits that each have obligations of certain deliverables in this area.

If your friend truly does have issues navigating the site perhaps she may want to look to a legal remedy -- from all appearances that is really the only knob that seems to have any impact on Musk.

Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate blind people? Serious question.

When is a good time to start holding them accountable?

It would be mind blowing to me and completely unexpected if twitter was not already under many active settlements related to accessibility lawsuits each with their own ongoing obligations.

There are very few large entities that have not been impacted by ADA lawsuits at this point -- even ones that had accessibility as a core value before the lawsuits.

Every website accessible to the public has some responsibility to accommodate the disabled.

https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

There are a lot of opportunistic/good hearted compassionate lawyers making a good business of shaking down smaller website operators for ADA compliance.

Damn patent trolls are missing out on this good lord.

I believe just meta has encountered many dozens of ADA related lawsuits for everything from their use of disability information for ad targeting to web accessibility -- both government instantiated and civil cases.

I am fairly sure much of their accessibility work was instantiated by these lawsuits and settlements.

https://www.facebook.com/help/273947702950567

Not really social media, but Netflix lost (settled) an ADA suit because they weren't providing subtitles consistently:

https://dredf.org/legal-advocacy/nad-v-netflix/

Has a social media site ever been forced to accommodate blind people?

Social media? Not to my knowledge.

But not having a website that's usable by the blind cost Target $6 million: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/target-settl...

Youtube to this day allows uploaders to disable automatic captions for some reason.

Because sometimes the automatic captions brutally butcher the text and can change the presenters meaning.

I think a recent court decision in CA determined that unless the website is a front for a brick & mortar real world place, they're not subject to the CA version of those laws (Unruh). How that would play with the ADA rules, I don't know, but this article mentions both. I'm not sure this issue is at all settled nationwide, but my take is bringing that lawsuit in CA won't get you very far.

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/california-court-appeal...

Kind of a shame, because it was my first thought too--losing the accessibility team and then removing all the accessible clients definitely won't make Musk many friends among disability advocates.

I do wonder, as a late afterthought, though, whether the legal principle behind making your accessibility worse via negligence or deprioritization (the internal team) or lack of due diligence (these apps) could be different than whether the government could require you to include it in the first place.

> official Twitter client is a LOT less accessible than the one she was using

She should submit an ADA complaint [1].

[1] https://www.ada.gov/file-a-complaint/

Was it this person?

> This makes me so sad. Your iPhone app allowed me as a blind person to use Twitter so much better than the app that they themselves produce. Sorry for the hostility you are receiving from them, but know that you are appreciated for the hard work you’ve done.

> Maybe the best thing anyone's ever told us. Thank you for this, truly. It is everything. Please take care.

https://mobile.twitter.com/RustyHilliard77/status/1616174474...

No, but I guess my friend isn't the only blind person in the world who uses Twitter. Class action lawsuit?

I'm hoping some of the new Mastodon clients come out have great accessibility features.

At the very least, one of the core features of the platform is it (at least on web) highly encourages captions on images for accessibility :)

(I know there is the issue of where people she was following on Twitter may not move over etc, sadly)

She's still probably better off, because what happens next to Twitter will continue to be less and less pretty.

The sooner people jump off the ship, the better for each of them.

Where will she jump to?

This discussion thread is rife with options like Ivory, Post, etc.

That is the challenge. Musk's tantrum has made an already-solved problem for a lot of people something they now have to re-solve. I'm generally recommending Mastodon to people (and can recommend a handful of specific nodes), but nothing auto-replaces Twitter.

Point is, unfortunately, Twitter's dying and its prognosis is poor. We can imagine it'll get better but the realistic strategy is to bail.

(My previous post lacked empathy, and I apologize for that. Some billionaire asshole spent a lot of money to break something that worked for a lot of people. That's not fair to them.)

I would take those node recommendations. I've dipped my toes in, but don't have the wherewithal right now to really figure out how to find what's worth following.

- mastodon.social is the closest thing Mastodon has to a "main" node. With the pros and cons associated with that. Given the relative youth of the experiment, I'd be a little concerned about whether admins can keep up with the growth, but it's probably the best of the "no opinion" options.

- qoto.org: member of United Federation of Instances. Relatively inclusive (and has some interesting extensions running on the base Mastodon service), but not necessarily federated to all the instances mastodon.social is federated to because they don't have a strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.

- mastodon.lol: antifa / LGBTQ+ / hacker-friendly node. Strict "Nazis fuck off" policy.

- infosec.exchange: InfoSec-focused Mastodon node, but pretty open with a pretty regular policy.

I think the strategy I'd probably recommend for a new user is something like "Join at mastodon.social, follow some people, and lurk. If you see many people you like who live at a particular node, migrate to that node."

(And honestly, unless a defederation fight breaks out, 90% of nodes are pretty interchangeable with each other; you can follow anyone the node federates to so it doesn't matter over-much which node you're on unless you want some specific features or you want admins who have a particular attitude towards your bugbear-topics).

What I did was use fedifinder to find all the people I already followed on Twitter and bootstrapped my account that way. It shows you what the most common instance is among the people you follow which is a good recommendation to choose that for signup, and then you can naturally find other people to follow through their boosts.

Also you don't have to fret about what instance you start off on. I started with one of the generic instances and then after a week of lurking I migrated my account to an instance that I wanted to join (which moves over all your followers/followings but not your posts)

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