Presentation for my ASSETS 2014 talk. Full paper here: http://www.cs.rochester.edu/hci/pubs/pdfs/companies-consumers.pdf

1. How Companies Engage Customers
Around Accessibility
on Social Media
Erin Brady
University of Rochester
Jeffrey P. Bigham
Carnegie Mellon University

2. Why did we do this research?
• We believe the internet, and specifically social
media, is a power platform to accomplish things
• Users and corporations can connect in new ways
• Initial exploration into how these connections
are currently taking place and can evolve

6. Related Work
• Webmasters may support accessibility, but not
know how to find or fix problems
• Twitter can be a useful way for organizations or
brands to gauge customer sentiments

7. Summary
• Examination of online corporate accessibility
• Twitter use patterns of 6 accessibility teams
▫ Tweets from the team
▫ Tweets to the team
▫ Interactions with Twitter users

8. Limitations
• Corporations ≠ people
• Not a proportional representation
▫ Sample is small
F. Morstatter, J. Pfeffer, H. Liu, and K. M. Carley. Is the sample good enough?
comparing data from twitter’s streaming api with twitter’s firehose.
Proceedings of ICWSM, 2013.

9. Corporate Accessibility
• Sample: Alexa Top 50 Companies
• Examined static & interactive accessibility markers
• Methodology:
▫ Standard search engine for each companies’ name &
a combination of accessibility-specific search terms
▫ Manually browsed each site, searched the help pages
▫ Search on social media platforms

10. Static Markers
• Accessibility policies
▫ 8 individual, with 3 other related companies
• Webpages or Blogs
▫ 12 had webpages
▫ 2 had accessibility-specific blogs

12. Static Markers
• Accessibility policies
▫ 8 individual, with 3 other related companies
• Webpages or Blogs
▫ 12 had webpages
▫ 2 had accessibility-specific blogs or posts

14. Interactive Markers
• Customer service:
▫ 48% of the companies had some customer service
▫ 7 had specific venues for accessibility feedback
• Contact information:
▫ 4 had a specific email address for accessibility
▫ 5 had specific phone numbers/TTY contact
• Social network sites:
▫ 6 teams had Twitter accounts
▫ 3 on Facebook

15. Why Twitter?
• Twitter is seen as a platform that brings people,
organizations, celebrities together
• Public by default
• Short, text-based interactions

16. Platform Specifics
• 140 character tweets
• One-way follow relationships
• Three types of tweets:
▫ Public tweets, broadcasted to all followers
▫ @-messages (sent to a specific user)
▫ Private messages (not analyzed)
• #Hashtags to group similar content
• Retweets shares content to your followers

20. Platform Specifics
• 140 character tweets
• One-way follow relationships
• Three types of tweets:
▫ Public tweets, broadcasted to all followers
▫ @-messages (sent to a specific user)
▫ Private messages (not analyzed)
• #Hashtags to group similar content
• Retweets to share content to your followers

21. Six Corporate Teams
Twitter
@a11yteam
Facebook
@fbaccess
Microsoft
@msftenable
Google
@googleaccess
Paypal
@paypalinclusive
Wordpress
@wpaccessibility

22. Behavioral Analysis
• Activity
• Use of platform features (links, hashtags)
• Engagement with other users
• Dialogic features
Lovejoy et al.
Kent et al.
K. Lovejoy, R. D. Waters, and G. D. Saxton. Engaging stakeholders through twitter:
How nonprofit organizations are getting more out of 140 characters or less. Public
Relations Review, 38(2):313–318, 2012.
M. L. Kent and M. Taylor. Building dialogic relationships through the world wide web.
Public relations review, 24(3):321–334, 1998.

23. Content Analysis
• Promotional tweets
▫ Draw awareness to the accessibility team
• Questions and criticisms
▫ Asked for more details about accessibility efforts
▫ Criticized a perceived lack of accessibility in products
• Responses
▫ Addressing questions or criticisms addressed
• Conversational tweets
▫ Structural features of the Twitter platform
▫ Tweets with little informational content

25. Content Analysis
• Promotional tweets
▫ Draw awareness to the accessibility team
• Questions and criticisms
▫ Asked for more details about accessibility efforts
▫ Criticized a perceived lack of accessibility in products
• Responses and answers
▫ Addressing questions or criticisms addressed
• Conversational tweets
▫ Structural features of the Twitter platform
▫ Tweets with little informational content

26. Accessibility Teams
• 184 tweets in April 2014
• 4/6 teams were active (3+ tweets/week)
▫ 1 team never tweeted at all
• Most were public messages
• All used platform features (links and hashtags)
• Engagement:
▫ Average 4881 followers, 85 users followed
▫ Retweet and mention behaviors varied greatly
• Dialogic prompts were rare

27. Dialogic Prompt

28. Accessibility Teams
• Performed on a sample of 108 tweets
• Majority were promotional (66%)
• Responses (29%) were mostly simple how-tos

30. Accessibility Teams
• Actively engaged in the platform.
• Accounts may be perceived more as promotional
than personal
• Hyperlinks and hashtags in public messages
indicate a desire to reach out and connect
• Low follow counts, but actively retweeting and
mentioning
• Are using platform to help users

31. Users and Accessibility Teams
• 121 tweets sent during April 2014
• Less public messages:
▫ average ratio of 1.2x public tweets to @-messages
• Limited hashtags, more hyperlinks

32. Users and Accessibility Teams
• Many were promotional (52%)
▫ sharing interesting accessible products, articles
Here's a new online build tool for accessibility fixes
http://accessifywiki.appspot.com/site/build.html?q|Fix:Google_search …
Powered by Closure Compiler, thanks Google! @googleaccess
• Questions and criticisms (15%)
So, what’s the gist of Windows 8.1 update 1 on phones? Does it have a
screen reader or not? CC @MSFTEnable
Really disappointed with Google. They removed custom user styles from
Chrome and removed inverted rendering in Android KitKat.
@googleaccess

33. Conversations
• 60 interactions (10 most recent for each team)
• Almost all initiated by user (54/60)
• Personal (2 or 3 participants)
• Short (average 3.47 messages exchanged)
• Tweets mostly questions (80%), responses (68%)
• Most (54/60) remained coherent

35. Discussion
• The platform affords interactions, but they are
not happening frequently
• Corporations can get benefits from participating,
interacting with users
• Can leverage as a way to learn about issues
• Use this analysis to find & route other questions

36. Discussion
• Twitter provides a valuable mechanism for
collecting user feedback and gauging opinions
• However, this feedback needs to be paid
attention to (and directed to the right people) to
be useful

37. Thanks for listening!
Erin Brady
brady@cs.rochester.edu
@erinleebrady
Jeffrey P. Bigham
jbigham@cmu.edu
@jeffbigham