On Twitter

[kestrell]

Although it goes against my nature to do anything that sounds so upbeat as "tweet," I'm going to take another stab at it. I recently discovered an app named "Easy Chirp" which makes using Twitter with a screen reader a bit easier.

I don't follow many people, because I find it overwhelming when the interface keeps updating every other second, but if anyone wants to follow me, my handle is kestrell13. The only recent post is one I just made with a link to my Halloween-related post on scare packages and secret witches.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

The only way I can cope with Twitter is using the "list" feature, which let me slice Twitter into tiny bits. I choose what I want to see, instead of seeing everything and then filtering it out.

Visit https://twitter.com/i/lists/create

After you've named the list you get a Twitter-wide search box. The list below search is already populated with names according to The Mightly Algorithm. Select the name to add it to the list.

For example, here's my "City of Madison" list, https://twitter.com/i/lists/1213559938812960769
It's only got 10 accounts on it, but there's more content because it shows their retweets.

There's a "more" button at the top of the edit lists screen which lets you hide these accounts from your home screen. So when I want to find out what's up in the city, I visit

https://twitter.com/jesse_the_k/lists

and select the "City" one. Otherwise, I don't see any of those accounts.

I "pin" a list which contains my dearest friends who only use Twitter. I drop by every week to see what they're doing. I've already heavily deployed

https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

to filter what I see even more. I still see shit that makes me miserable every time I visit.

[kestrell]

Thank you for this: I would like to get a better grip on using Twitter, even if I don't spend too much time on it. The two categories I am interested in are horror and assistive technology, but it really doesn't matter what you do nowadays, the real world still manages to leak in through the cracks.

[jesse_the_k]

Good news about Assistive Tech — folks are very consistent about posting with the #a11y hashtag — which is in itself fairly opaque, but very easy to search on once you've learned the secret code.

[kestrell]

Yes, I recently joined a Boston area accessibility group that uses the a11y in their group name: the first online meeting is tomorrow afternoon.

On the one hand, I understand the use of the l33t-style spelling but, on the other, the alpha-numeric strings can be confusing to listen to at first. It reminds me of the net in the early nineties, and how it took me *forever* to realize what the constant use of str8 meant.