How companies engage customers around accessibility on social media

Social media offers a targeted way for mainstream technology companies to communicate with people with disabilities about the accessibility problems that they face. While companies have started to engage with users on social media about accessibility, they differ greatly in terms of their approach and how well they support the ways in which their users want to engage. In this paper, we describe current use patterns of six corporate accessibility teams and their users on Twitter, and present an analysis of these interactions. We find that while many users want to interact directly with companies about accessibility, companies prefer to redirect them to other channels and use Twitter for broadcast messages promoting their accessibility work instead. Our analysis demonstrates that users want to use social media to become part of the process of improving accessibility of mainstream technology, and suggests the extent to which a company is able to leverage this input depends greatly on how they choose to present themselves and interact on social media.