Twitterfeed, the service we’ve been using mostly reliably to tweet our new posts to the world since 2010, is shutting down tomorrow. If you’re a webmaster and you didn’t know that, you might want to get on finding a replacement soon. Sorry for fucking up your Sunday.
I’ve known for a while, but hadn’t gotten around to setting up something new until this morning. The service we went with is DLVR.it, which looks like it should handle things just fine and has a lot of other bells and whistles that we’re likely never going to use. At least it had better handle things just fine, considering how much of a pain in the ass it was to get going.
It’s designed to be an easy set-up, which it absolutely would have been if not for the part where I’m blind and the folks what built the dlvr.it website didn’t feel it necessary to use proper buttons, links or checkboxes to control things accept in a few places seemingly chosen at random and worse yet, couldn’t be arsed to put labels on the list of social networks you could connect to which meant I had to try each clickable until I found the right one. Thankfully Twitter was the second one from the top so I didn’t have to click all nine that were showing in the list, but why should I even have to do that? It takes mere seconds to add alt text to something. Please take them. It means a lot.
If you’re blind and choose to use this service, I should also note that if you want to get to the rest of the set-up process once you’ve found a feed, don’t click the view link that appears below the title of your feed, click the feed title itself, which of course isn’t a link and doesn’t indicate in any meaningful way that you’re supposed to press enter on it to make things happen. Also, that clickable that says sharing to one of one socials that you’ll see at some point after you’re done, don’t touch it. It’s meant to be a checkbox and pressing enter on it will cause you to suddenly be sharing to 0 of 1 socials, which is not, I assume, what you want since you’re setting up auto tweeting and it has to have somewhere to go.
Dlvr.it is far from the clunkiest, most inaccessible pile I’ve ever seen, but it’s a completely unnecessary slog since the issues are so easy to fix if somebody would just take the time. It’s enough of a slog that I, whose main functions in life are to write dick jokes and make chili, went through the process twice to spare Carin, who does accessibility for a living, the hassle of dealing with it.
My tests show that everything should be working as it’s supposed to, but as usual at times like this, if you’re following either of us on Twitter and notice anything odd, let us know. And if you’re not following us on Twitter, good for you. But if you’d like to start for whatever reason, all you need to know is on this page right here.
