Twitter accessibility issue and a temporary workaround

You may have already heard that Twitter was sold to Elon Musk, and as part of his restructuring, he laid off many employees, including the entire Twitter accessibility team. Unfortunately, this has led to a significant accessibility issue with x (formarly Twitter) for Android that has persisted for nearly two years without a fix.

Navigating through tweets is still a nightmare

If you’re using the latest version of X, you may have noticed that the screen reader repeats earlier tweets as you scroll through your feed. The focus doesn’t return to the repeated tweets, meaning you could double-tap a tweet only to activate a different one entirely. This bug has made X difficult to use for screen reader users, and sadly, there’s no resolution in sight.

iOS accessibility was fixed quickly—what about Android?

Interestingly, there was a similar accessibility issue that affected iOS users some time ago. That issue was addressed and resolved fairly quickly. However, the Android version of X has been plagued by this critical issue for almost two years now, making us wonder if X (formerly Twitter) gives less priority to the accessibility needs of blind Android users. It certainly feels like we’re being treated differently, and it’s frustrating to see no meaningful effort to fix this problem on Android.

Temporary workaround – but for how long?

At Accessible Android, we provided an older version of Twitter that seemed to work. While it is still functional, upon installation and log-in, you are prompted to download the latest version of the app. There’s no option to ignore this, but we’ve found that if you head to the Play Store and then close it, the older version will continue to work—for now. However, given that this version is two years old, there’s no guarantee of how long this workaround will remain effective.

Click here to download the APK

What’s next?

While this workaround may help temporarily, it’s clear that relying on an outdated version is not a long-term solution. We continue to urge Twitter to address this critical accessibility issue, but until they do, this two-year-old version is the only option we have for now. Please make sure to disable automatic updatesfor Twitter once installed to avoid the app being updated to the broken version.