Twitter posts embedded in news articles — navigation strategies?

By Luke, 30 August, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

When reading an article in the Apple news app using voiceover, I find embedded Twitter posts to be a real nuisance! I like to just single finger swipe my way through the paragraphs of an article but swiping through a Twitter post and it’s numerous elements is extremely tedious. Short of three fingers scrolling down and trying to guess where the Twitter post ends seems to be the only other solution but neither of these promote a fluid, comfortable reading experience. Has anybody found good strategies for navigating past these obnoxious embedded posts? Frankly, I think it’s poor journalism if you can’t tell your story without lazily embedding others Twitter posts, but that’s a subject for another time. :)

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Comments

By Dawn 👩🏻‍🦯 on Saturday, September 25, 2021 - 07:39

I'm seeing this too. On websites, and other news apps. I find it quite annoying myself. I'm like you because I swipe through the article to read it. Stimes if I'm feeling really lazy, I'll will swipe down with 2 fingers and let VoiceOver read it all to me. I find embedded social media posts in news articles to be quite annoying. It's like:

If I wanted to see either the post you made about it on Twitter, or the person's Twitter or Fb. post that made the news, then I would go to Twitter! But, I don't want to. That's why I am reading the freaking news article!! At most, if you must including it, put it in as a screenshot. Those are easier to swipe past/through in my experience.
I know what I said sounds harsh. But, I'm with you. As a VoiceOver user, this kind of thing makes navigating already unfriendly, and inaccessible pages that much harder on us.

Needless to say, I'm following this post because I'd love to get ideas on how to either get this thorn out of my side, or make the pain from said thorn more tolerable.

By Luke on Saturday, September 25, 2021 - 07:39

Hi Dawn. Totally agree! The only problem with screenshots is the accessibility can vary depending on how well VO can OCR them. If the entire Twitter post could be presented in a single voiceover element similar to how Facebook posts appear in the Facebook news feed, that would be perfect. This would still allow us to read and interact with the content but be able to easily swipe past it if we weren’t interested.