I rarely use twitter (I refuse Musk’s nomenclature) any more. There are more than enough fascists in real life.
But I saw some posts on Mastodon about how the site has removed headlines from links to news sites. So thought I’d have a look.
The #a11y implications are terrible. There is no link text any more, just an aria-label attribute on an <a> element.
But these also have tabindex=”-1″ meaning, for keyboard users, you can’t focus links using the tab key.
Images have empty alt attributes.
Screenreader users can probably still find them by asking their AT for a list of links.
But many people navigate websites primarily with a keyboard for reasons other than blindness or low vision.
Although this was … not unexpected … it’s still just so disappointing. Twitter had a very good and very active accessibility team who did a lot of good work. They were all fired.
Twitter is degrading its #UX –intentionally – to fulfil the whims of an oligarch.
I’ll not be back.
I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years.