Accessibility
Read My Tweets exists to make threads easier to read and hear, so the site itself has to be usable by the people it is meant for. This page describes what we have built, what we have tested, and what we know is still rough.
Display options
The Display menu at the top of every page changes the whole site:
- Text size: normal, large or extra large. This scales everything, including the reader controls.
- Font: a serif reading face, a sans-serif face, or OpenDyslexic, a typeface designed for readers with dyslexia.
- Contrast: normal or high. High contrast uses pure black and white with a yellow highlight, and follows your system's light or dark setting.
- Line spacing: normal or wide, which also adds a little letter and word spacing.
Your choices are saved in this browser and applied before the page appears, so there is no flash of the default style. The site also follows your system's dark mode and reduced motion settings.
Keyboard
Every control can be reached and used with the keyboard, and focus is always visible. In the thread reader and on the guides, single-key shortcuts control playback: Space or K to play and pause, J and L (or the arrow keys) to move by sentence, Esc to stop, and plus and minus to change speed. Shortcuts are ignored while the cursor is in a text field, and pressing the question mark key shows the list.
Screen readers
The reading view is ordinary paragraphs, so screen readers read it like any article. Controls are standard buttons, selects and sliders with visible labels. Playback state changes ("Playing", "Paused", "Finished") are announced through a polite live region; sentence-by-sentence progress is not announced, to avoid talking over the voice.
If you use a screen reader, you may prefer its own voice to the browser's read-aloud. Paste the thread, then read the cleaned text with your usual commands.
What we tested
We check the site with the keyboard only, at a 390-pixel-wide phone layout, in light, dark and high-contrast modes, and with the speech voices in a current Chromium-based browser. Safari and Firefox use the same standard speech interface, but we have tested them less, so reports from users of those browsers are especially welcome.
Known limits
- Read-aloud depends on your browser's voices. Some systems have only one English voice, and a few browsers have none, in which case the play controls are switched off and the rest of the reader still works.
- Sentence highlighting is per sentence, not per word, so the highlight can feel slow on long sentences.
- The cleanup is based on how X formats copied text today. If X changes that format, some clutter may slip through until we update the reader.
If something does not work for you, please write to contact@readmytweets.com.