Unfortunately, like all good things people decide to start tinkering and attempting to improve what’s already a very good service leading to the onslaught of micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micro media such as photos or audio clips and publish them. In short YouTube and Twitter.

Personally, I view YouTube more as a viral marketing tool than a blogging tool but I’m afraid that I’m in the minority on that. Twitter on the other hand provides real time updates on the people you are following. True this is more “blog like” but I always feel left wanting to know more. These are both great tools and tooted as available for all but are they truly accessible to all. Let’s examine one and to see.

Twitter.com is built to be an intuitive and easy to use site but it fails on a number of important accessibility and usability points:

- Html is not structured correctly with its headings out of order
- Forms are not correctly marked up
- There is a host of validation issues with cause screen readers to fail

And this is without taking into account the “tweets” added by users. Obviously, I am not the only person who noticed the accessible short comings of Twitter and
Dennis Lembree using the API provided by Twitter has built an accessible interface - accessibletwitter.com

So how does this interface compare to twitter.com:

- The site meets most of the WCAG checkpoints falling short by not having valid code
- All links are keyboard accessible.
- Simple, consistent layout and navigation
- Headings and page titles are implemented for optimal accessibility. This includes an H3 heading (for author screen name) added to tweets to assist with screen reader users.
- Works with or without JavaScript.
- Ajax actions are concluded with an alert that notifies the user of the result of the action.
- Large default text size and high colour contrast.
- When entering tweets, audio cues indicate when the character limit is almost reached.
- Forms and data tables are marked up for optimal accessibility.

Combined Twitter and Accessible Twitter provide all users with a usable micro-blogging tool that is truly accessible to all. If either can improve on their approach is to have a link from the main Twitter website to the accessible version.