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2012-02-14-Twitter Part 1

Seminars@Hadley

Networking with Twitter Part 1

Presented by Dennis LembreeTom Babinszki

Moderated by Larry Muffett

February 14, 2012

Tom Babinszki

Good morning. My name is Tom Babinszki. Welcome to the Twitter seminar. It’s really great to have you here. It’s one of those very exciting seminars that we are going to present today and two weeks from today. And it’s really nice to see that – I see some familiar names but even nicer to see that I see many new names. Welcome to the Hadley Seminar. If this is your first time and I hope you have a nice experience and we’ll see you back again.

It is my great pleasure to introduce Dennis Lembree. I have worked with him on several different projects over the last several years. And he has really made a

©2012 The Hadley School for the Blind of 34


huge difference in technology for blind and visually impaired people. He’s actually partly responsible for getting me into Twitter. I started being a much more active Twitter user when he put together a website. At that point it was called Accessible Twitter. Today it’s called Easy Chirp. And finally, it made it truly accessible to me as a blind person who is a screen (inaudible) user and it was just more fun to use Twitter.

Dennis lives in California but originally he’s from… And he has worked with a bunch of large companies such as PayPal, Ford, Google, Walt Disney World and I could go and on with the list that he has, the way the companies that he has impacted. He’s a passionate web accessibility specialist and supporter. He runs a podcast and a website and a blog dedicated to web accessibility. As I mentioned he had written a website to make it easier for screen reader users to use Twitter that is called Easy Chirp. And in his free time, when he’s not overwhelmed with accessibility, he’s just playing the guitar, watching football and spending time with his wife and two boys. Dennis, thank you so much for accepting our invitation to do this seminar today. And let me turn it over to you and Larry.



Larry MuffettI’m going to hop in for just a second here and just a couple of introductory sentences and then I’m going to turn this over to Dennis and I’m also going to get his PowerPoint presentation up on the screen. The interest that we’ve seen in today’s topic is reflective of just how important social networking is in all its forms, both as for our personal enjoyment but also as a business tool and to help entrepreneurs. And we’re going to look at a platform today that really sort of equalizes the big businesses with the small business because this is a platform where everyone is pretty much on equal footing. And it’s something that we hear a lot about and some of us use it and some of us don’t, so I’m really looking forward to turning this over to Dennis. And I’m going to do that at this point and I’m going to get his PowerPoint started and let’s get started with today’s seminar.

Dennis LembreeThanks Larry. And thank you very much Tom. That was a great introduction. I was touched, actually. I’m waiting for the slides to come up. Okay. This is part one: Networking with Twitter, as Larry mentioned. Today we’ll be speaking more about the basics of Twitter and how those basics work on the web accessible Easy Chirp Twitter application. Today I got a great intro but we’ll just real fast cover a little bit



more about myself. Then we’ll go into a brief history of Twitter and some fun stats and facts, speak a little about how to sign up and then why Easy Chirp, why my application is a good one to use as an example for using Twitter, some navigation techniques within Easy Chirp and then we’ll get into some basics about Twitter: what a status is and the timeline, mentions, replies, re-tweets, favorites, direct messages, hash tags.

And then I’ll talk about some tools like search, lists, trends and on Easy Chirp there’s a popular links page. And I’ll mention a few future plans for Easy Chirp that have been on hold for a little while, unfortunately, how to give feedback and we’ll mention some other accessible Twitter applications. And then take some questions and contact info and such. The next session will be more focused on techniques on using Twitter and marketing for your small business.

So, like Tom mentioned, I am the author of Easy Chirp – just EasyChirp.com, @EasyChirp on Twitter. And, yeah, it use to be called Accessible Twitter. And the name changed for a few reasons: one is just that it’s shorter and two is it’s more generic and three you’re not really supposed to use the word Twitter in the name of your Twitter application so I removed it. And I’m also the author of the blog and podcast that



Tom mentioned. It’s called WebAxe.Blogspot.com. So I put out – lately it’s just been a podcast every couple of months and then a few blog posts, one or two blog posts a month, and that’s been going on for, like, six years.

So hopefully you’ve heard of it and if you haven’t and you’re into web development and or accessibility then please check it out. In my day job I’m currently working at PayPal, a web dev in San Jose. And, fortunately, I have the opportunity to use my skills in web accessibility so that’s gone great. And, like Tom said, I’ve also worked for a variety of companies: Ford, I was actually a full time contractor at Ford and Disney and I contracted at Google and then I worked full time for several startups. I live in Cupertino with my wife and two boys. The two little boys definitely keep us busy.

Okay, just a little background on Twitter. It actually originates from a, quote, day long brain storming session held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. And that was back in 2006. And so it actually was born out of this meeting and a short time after, the company was started in July of 2006 by three guys: Jack Dorsey (@Jack), Biz Stone (@Biz) and Evan Williams (@Ev). And when they first started it was just an SMS service. It was just for



mobile phones to SMS messages within a specific group of people. That was the very origins of it. You can still use the Twitter SMS service today if you wanted to.

And just some stats to give you an idea of the popularity of Twitter: in a recent report it was shown that there is about 175 million tweets or status updates per day on Twitter. And the United States leads the way as far as countries in the world. But it’s also very popular in Brazil, Japan and the UK. And also, I just wanted to add, it’s also very popular in the Netherlands. Even though that’s a real small country, there’s a high percentage of people who are using it and using it a lot.

A high percentage of Easy Chirp users are actually in the Netherlands, UK as well as the US. And Twitter’s most followed user is Lady Gaga, who has nearly 20 million followers. Then other celebrities like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry are next. And approximately 64% of Twitter users still use Twitter – or access Twitter – via their main website, Twitter dot com. And about 11 Twitter accounts are created every second.

Just some fun factoids. Talking about the origins of Twitter, it was first named Twttr, spelled T-W-T-T-R. Kind of a cutesy name inspired by Flickr – that service



and how that’s spelled. And the name of the bird and the logo, the name is Larry the Bird. Which, obviously, if you know basketball, was named after the Boston Celtics NBA star Larry Bird. One of the founders, I believe, was from Boston.

And that infamous fail whale, it’s an illustration of a whale with birds, it’s like an error message which used to come up a whole lot on Twitter. That was created by an artist and designer in Sydney Australia and – I’m not sure how you pronounce his name, [Yaying Lu]. And it’s kind of actually been like a sub cult on the fail whale illustrations. It’s pretty funny. There’s been a lot of parodies and stuff on that illustration around the web.

Okay, so for signing up, you have to use Twitter’s website to create an account. So just go to Twitter dot com or Twitter dot com slash signup and, I believe, it’s accessible to create an account. If someone tries it please get back with me and let me know how it goes. There, as far as the history of it, it used to be inaccessible or it used to have a CAPTCHA and now they added an audio CAPTCHA to it. And, when I last checked it, I didn’t actually create an account recently, but I’m not sure, they might have removed it. Somebody left a good comment: “There is a CAPTCHA thing you have to



enter. The audio one is horrible.” Alright, thanks for the information.

Okay. And Chris says he has to have a sighted to help to create the account. That’s unfortunate. If you do have trouble you could always send… Well, let’s see, in my next presentation I’ll talk more about getting help from Twitter. But you could always tweet them or look on their website. Try @Twitter or @TwitterAPI on Twitter and see if you get a response. But when you sign up you’ll have to, obviously, create an account name, also known as your username or your Twitter handle.

So some recommendations for that – I’ll try to keep it short. That’s one lesson I learned with Accessible Twitter is you can’t have the word Twitter in your handle. I learned that also. Try to keep it memorable, you know, catchy but not too difficult to remember. Make sure it identifies you or your business, your type of business. Try to avoid special characters because that, obviously, can be more difficult.

Got a couple more comments on the signing up, so thanks for that. Somebody said they were able to sign up using an iPhone app with no problem. I have a couple of slides here with a bunch of rules from Twitter. I’m not going to read it in its entirety but just



some sanity checks here when you create your account. Some of the rules include impersonations: “You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service.” “Do not mislead, confuse or deceive others as to who you are.” As far as trademarks go, Twitter does reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals who hold legal claim or trademark to their names. In privacy, “Do not publish or post other people’s private and confidential information.”

“Do not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Hopefully that goes without being said. Username squatting. This is a good one. It says, “You may not engage in username squatting”, which means you can’t just hold an account for six months without it being active or it could be removed. So if you’re saving names or you’ve registered names I suggest at least every few months to go in and log in with that and make sure it doesn’t get taken away. “You may not buy or sell Twitter usernames.” “No SPAM”, which has been a bit of a problem on Twitter. Not huge but just a little annoying. “No pornography.”

So why Easy Chirp? Well, number one, it’s accessible. It’s the only Twitter web client that’s written specifically to be accessible. You might find a couple of other mobile web ones, which I’ll mention



later, but they might not have some of the same features or have some of the flexibility and robustness and screen reader help that Easy Chirp has. It works well with screen readers and keyboard-only users, low vision users: the layout is high contrast and is very flexible.

And it’s also a very robust web application. It’s built straight to web standards and progressive enhancements, semantic markup. So it works well in all different kinds of conditions. If you have low band internet connection, old technologies like IE 6. It works without JavaScript. And because of all that it also works on text-only browsers like Lynx. Actually, I posted a picture from the CSUN Conference a couple of weeks ago of somebody using Easy Chirp on Lynx, which was really cool.

Easy Chirp supports all the main features of Twitter. And it’s also easy to use – that’s a part of accessibility. It’s good for users who are new to Twitter or are new to the internet. And Easy Chirp has won a few awards. Most recently the AFB 2011 Access Award – that was about a year ago – and then this past December Easy Chirp was the RNIB Featured Website.



Okay. So you have your Twitter account and you’re on Easy Chirp dot com. So now what do you do? There’s plenty of information on a few pages on Twitter. Easy Chirp dot com. You can sign in. Go to the homepage. And you want to use the Sign In With Twitter button. It’s under the Sign In heading. Because Easy Chirp is accessible and built with semantic markup there’s different ways to get there using the heading or whatever tools you have to get there.

There’s also a skip to main content link on every page. But the homepage has a Skip To Sign In link also so that’s a quick way to get to the Sign In button. And, like any Twitter web app, it uses Twitter’s Open Authentication process. And that requires – so you’re not surprised – the approval of account access from Twitter’s website. So it will do is take you to a special page on Twitter dot com and then you… Yes, that’s the spelling, Alice.

With the Open Auth sign in process it’ll take you to Twitter dot com page and then you just select the option to approve and then it’ll take you back to the main timeline on Easy Chirp. And just to confirm, thanks Alice, the spelling is E-A-S-Y-C-H-I-R-P dot com. Okay. So once you’re in to navigate there’s



ARIA markup landmark roles and there’s headings as consistent, and I feel pretty user friendly and easy.

The H1 is always Easy Chirp and the second level heading is My Info. At the top of every page you have your username and your number of followers and stuff. H2 is Menu. And there’s a quick Go To User widget. Then the main app menu and the tweet menu, and those are H3s. So the next heading is What’s Happening?, and that’s where you enter your Twitter status or your tweet. Under that there’s the H3 My Latest Tweet and an H3 Shorten URL. The next H2 is the timeline or the name of whatever page you’re on.

So that’s the main content. And under the timeline, each tweet will have a H3 heading. So it might be easier to navigate or if you don’t have CSS it’s easier to view. And so every tweet will have an H3. And the H3 is the account name of the person who wrote that tweet. If you’re using a screen reader that supports ARIA, there are a few ARIA landmarks to help you navigate: a banner and two navigation ones, the Main Menu and at the very bottom there’s a pagination so the older, newer, for the timeline to paginate. There’s ARIA main landmark for the main content and then the footer, the contact info for the footer. Okay. Larry suggests we take a couple of questions now.



LindaHi. My name is Linda and I’d like to know what is the oldest version of JAWS that you would think would work with Easy Chirp and the ARIA program?

Larry MuffettWe had another question here, too, Dennis. Basically, a kind of real, basic question but I think kind of goes to the heart of things. One of our people in the chat room wanted to know what’s the basic difference between Twitter and Facebook?

CallerDennis, I was curious about – if you could answer this – Twitter’s DM limitation. I was curious as to why that is because I run out of DMs all the time.

Dennis LembreeOkay. Let me answer these three questions. I started to talk and I forgot to turn on my mic – thanks Larry. JAWS. I do not know for sure how far back the support goes for JAWS. I imagine pretty far back. The markup isn’t real complex. I do – on Twitter there’s a guy you may have heard of, Jennison. And he probably has the answer to that. So if you want to tweet him, it’s just @Jennison, J-E-N-N-I-S-O-N. And he’s a JAWS user and he’s a web accessibility



professional out of Toronto.

The difference between Twitter and Facebook? Twitter – well, one thing is this: your statuses are limited to 140 characters in Twitter. So that’s one big difference. It’s more of a streaming, quick timeline. It’s totally text based. And it depends on the Twitter client on what it does with the tweet – if there’s a link to images or web pages or videos and what it does with that. So it really depends. But Facebook is a little more closed environment and it’s more… I don’t know. I hope that answers your question. I have to think about that one a little more.

The DM limits, I’m sorry, I’m not able to answer that one either right now. I do not know what the limit is. I know it used to be set – I thought they removed them, the limitations, but apparently not. So if there is a limit, you might, if it’s possible, it could be an API limit because for tweets you do still have an API hit limit on third party applications. But on Twitter dot com there is no limit so I’m not sure if that’s extended to DMs or not. It may or may not be. Great questions.

And on the JAWS thing, as far as ARIA goes, Amy, thank you. She wrote a comment, “JAWS will not support ARIA inversions before 11.” And Easy Chirp, like I said, it does have some ARIA in it but it’s not a whole ton of it, you know? So you can get by without



a problem at all if your screen reader doesn’t support ARIA. It just helps a little bit more if your screen reader does support it. Okay, so let’s get back to the presentation. We’re on slide 15. We started talking about the status and the timeline.

Dennis LembreeBasics, status and timeline. So, really, the status is the core of Twitter, also known as a tweet. Oh, thanks Chris. He just sent a message: “There is a DM limit of 250 per day. Mine resets at 10:00 AM.” Good to know, thanks a lot. So the status or the tweet is the core of Twitter, and it’s a short text based message. It has to be less than 140 characters. That’s kind of the essence of a tweet.

And all tweets are public with one exception: if you mark you entire account private then your tweets will not public. That’s not really a recommended usage, though. If you really want to be popular on Twitter or you want to promote your company or just to be social and have other people be able to contact you then I don’t recommend marking your account private. Not very many people, though, actually do that. But if you want to be private and in a closed network then that option is always there.



When Twitter first started the question to answer for your status was, “What are you doing?” That was kind of the original idea because Twitter’s like a quick… Maybe that’s another between Facebook is Twitter is more of what’s happening right now – that was at least the original idea: what are you doing right now? Just kind of your very current, current status. And they changed that to – once people started using it, it became a little more open than that – “What’s happening?” And now, if you go to the new, new Twitter there is no question at all, at least visible.

It just has like a text box for you to enter your tweet. But there’s no real question even listed there anymore. Oh, sorry, DM. I believe I said it once at the beginning of the presentation that DM is Direct Message. And we’ll get to that. That’s like a closed text message, a private message to another user. And on Easy Chirp when you enter your tweet or status the question and label for that field is, “What’s happening?” So the tweet is similar to a Facebook status or wall post and similar to the LinkedIn update.

To create a status in Easy Chirp, as I mentioned, the status text field is labeled, “What’s happening?” And there is a character counter and that has an ARIA attribute. So if your screen reader supports ARIA, it’s set to ARIA-live=polite so if you pause from your



typing it should tell you the number of characters you have remaining, a countdown from 140.

Somebody asked the question, “Can you spell the website again?” Sure, Craig. Easy Chirp dot com. E-A-S-Y-C-H-I-R-P dot com. So to create the status, the text field is labeled, “What’s happening?” There’s the ARIA Countdown Widget. There’s also a URL shortener below the Status field and you have an option now to choose the Bitly URL shortener service and now also somewhat recently added is the WebAIM shortener service. So you could choose which one you want. It defaults to Bitly.

And if you like an Easy Chirp there’s also a link to tweet about Easy Chirp, which will… It’s just above the Status field and that’ll automatically enter a nice message in the text input fields that you could modify to your liking. And the Status field is available at the top of three pages – from the Main Timeline page, it’s at the top of My Tweets page and the Mentions page. Oh, “Why would you shorten a URL?” That’s become a very popular service so if you want to tweet about an article on the web, most URLS nowadays, the web page address is quite long. So if you have enough room to paste it in your tweet, I mean, you can do that. But usually you don’t so you have to shorten the URL. And there are services that will give you a short



URL – which, if you go it, just forwards you to the long one to save the number of characters in your tweet.

Okay, so the timeline, that’s the default page when you log into Easy Chirp and that’s the list of status messages from the accounts that you follow. There’s 20 statuses or tweets per page. The people you are following are also called your friends. And then there are you followers, the accounts that are following you. Oh, that’s right. Going back to a previous question, that is another difference between Facebook and Twitter and also between LinkedIn and Twitter.

On Facebook there’s a one to one relationship if you’re friends with somebody or LinkedIn with somebody. If you’re friends with them they’re friends with you automatically. But on Twitter that’s not the case. You can be following people but they might not follow you or somebody could be following you and you’re not following them. So it’s a little more complex and when we get to talk about replying to a tweet you’ll see what I mean.

Each status in a timeline has the tweet text. The very first thing, actually, is the user icon and then the tweet text. And then below the tweet, there’s the username and they all have shortcuts to the user’s timeline. So you’ll see a timeline for only that user and a link to DM



that person, Direct Message that person, and a link to tweet that person to send a public tweet or mention, which is just a shortcut to insert their username into the status text field.

Then you have some tweet options. So you can favorite a tweet, a link to reply and a newer feature is reply to all, a quote tweet and re-tweet. And we’ll talk about all those. And each tweet will also list the date and time, and that’s linked, and if you click it, kind of like… Well, on Twitter dot com it used to be – if you click the date and time it’ll take you to a page with only that tweet on it. And it’ll have the name of the application that the user used to create that tweet. So all that information is there under each tweet in the timeline.

And just something else to point out. There’s not a lot of complex showing and hiding and crazy JavaScript features to that. The links, at least currently and traditionally, have always been static and visible and tabable and consistent so it’s real easy to use. Okay. A mention. What’s a mention? Well, when someone writes a tweet and they put in your username, the @ symbol and your username, that’s a mention. So that’s how you mention somebody, with the @ symbol and the username.



So if you go to the mentions page that’ll show a timeline of your mentions. It’ll show all the tweets that people wrote that refer to you or has your username in that tweet. So why would you mention somebody? Well, there’s all kinds of reasons but if somebody mentions you in their tweet, they might be directing a tweet to you. Maybe they’re asking you a question directly or something or a tweet message like I mentioned before. It’s kind of like a conversation.

Or they might be giving credit for your work, for maybe an article or something, they’re tweeting about an article or they might put by Dennis L or put your name there. They might be giving you credit for a tweet so if you – we’ll talk more about it – but if you re-tweet or quote tweet somebody or somebody repeats your tweet, they should put your username in there and say, “This tweet was written by…” you. They could be asking you or others a question. Or they could just be copying you with information.

I like to use a slash CC at the end of a tweet and put one or two usernames in there if I just want to carbon copy somebody on a tweet – just to make sure they read it. You put their username in there. And this is where the real social interaction takes place on Twitter because when you’re mentioning people it just



makes it more interactive and then you can reply and that’s kind of the big social aspect of Twitter.

Okay, so a reply, what’s a reply? A reply is like a mention, sort of, but the tweet is marked as a response to your tweet. So if you see a tweet and you hit reply the tweet will insert the username of the person that you’re replying to. But when you submit the tweet there will be extra information imbedded in that tweet that’ll mark it specifically as a reply to the original tweet. It depends on the Twitter application that you’re using and how it relays that information.

When you reply to somebody, if you hit reply the Twitter app will usually automatically insert the username of the person you’re replying to. But if it’s deleted or if it’s not there when you try to reply then the tweet will still go through but it just won’t be marked specifically as reply. You have to make sure the username remains there. And usually when you’re replying to somebody you put the @username first. That usually comes very first in your tweet.

So in Easy Chirp if you’re going through the timeline there’s a reply icon with reply alt text and so you could just simply select or click that to reply to a tweet. And when you’re reading through the timeline you can tell if a tweet is a reply tweet because at the end of the



tweet there’ll be a responding link at the end of it. And also visually, on the right side, there’s like a gray curved arrow on the right showing that it’s a reply. But also just from reading the tweet you can kind of tell that it’s a reply because it usually, like I mentioned, it starts with an @username.

The reply tweets, if you’re reading through the timeline and you read a tweet and the last link in the tweet information is responding, you know for sure that that’s reply. And you can click the responding link and then the original tweet will be pulled in and displayed underneath with JavaScript. And if you have an ARIA enabled screen reader there’s an attribute there that will let you know that the new content is pulled in. And if you don’t have JavaScript, it’s pulled in with Ajax. If you don’t have JavaScript, you’ll just be taken to a new page with that original tweet.

Okay. And there is one kind of nuance to replies. A reply appears in your timeline only if a user follows both a sender and the receiver. So if two people that you’re following are having a little conversation you’ll see that in your timeline. But if you’re not following one of those two people – if you’re only following one of those two people, you will not see that in your timeline. So one technique: if you are replying to



somebody else and you want to make sure that everyone sees that, everyone that’s following you sees that in their timeline, including the people that are not following the person you’re replying to, you would put a period at the very beginning of the tweet. So in front of the @username when you reply to somebody, insert a period. That way you make sure that everyone will see that tweet no matter if they’re following just you or both of you.

And, when you have all these replies together, that creates a little conversation – which is kind of neat. The conservation gets long, though. It can become a little intrusive. So if two I’m following are having a reply conversation on Twitter and it gets long and I’m not interested, it can get a little obnoxious because I’m seeing all those tweets of their conversation. I suggest, you know, that you might want to explore a different avenue to have a longer conversation.

And Easy Chirp, I mentioned also, offers a reply to all feature. A lot of clients are doing that nowadays. If you click that it’ll not only insert @username of the person you want to reply to but it’ll insert all the usernames that are mentioned in the tweet. So with one click you could reply to a tweet and then you don’t have to remember or copy and paste. All of the



usernames from the first tweet will be automatically entered in the status field.

Okay, we got some good questions coming in. Let me answer this one because that directly has to do with what we’re talking about, “Does the period go before or after the @ sign?” It goes before. So your tweet would be: period @username space and then your reply.

Re-tweets or RT. That is when you pass along or you copy another person’s tweet, a re-tweet. And it cannot be modified. And there’s also something called a quote tweet or a classic re-tweet. We’ll just call it quote tweet. And that’s when you’re writing a – it’s not a re-tweet – but you are kind of copying the person’s tweet and you’re giving them credit. So it’s like an original tweet but you’re using their words and you’re giving them credit for it. And this was kind of the norm on Twitter until after a few years they created the new re-tweet functionality.

So I guess it’s a little hard to get your head around at first. So the re-tweet just kind of passes it along and a quote tweet is more like you’re giving the person credit. So for quote tweets, if you don’t want to use the re-tweet method and you want to do a quote tweet these are some guidelines. I mean, you don’t have to



do it this way but this is kind of what I put together. If your tweet is virtually the same as the original one, use the RT abbreviation. So RT @ username and then the person’s tweet that you’re passing along. If you’re modifying their tweet, you could use the MT acronym – that’s modified tweet.

So you could do MT @username and then kind of modify their tweet. Or if you’re just passing along a link and changing the tweet a lot or maybe you just heard of something from somebody, you could write a tweet and then at the end – or the beginning – you could put Via or HT, which means Hat Tip, and then just give credit to one or more people where you originally got that information from. And some apps, mainly the official Twitter apps, don’t do any of those things. If you’re doing a quote tweet it’ll actually insert quotation marks around the original tweet instead of using these acronyms.

So a favorite is a tweet obviously marked as a favorite. So that’ll go in… And you can view favorites on a different page. So it’ll be a timeline of all the tweets that you’ve marked. And if you mark a favorite – just so you know – they are public. Other people can see what tweets you marked as favorite. It’s kind of a less used or little known and less implemented feature among Twitter applications but it is there and



it is there in Easy Chirp. So usually to create or remove a favorite from a Twitter app is most times there’s just some kind of star, icon that you can toggle, turn on and off, to mark it as a favorite tweet.

Okay. We’re running low on time so I’m going to kind of fly through the rest of the slides. So in Easy Chirp, with the rest, well, we talked about all the options underneath each tweet so there’s a favorite star icon. The alt text is Make Favorite. If it is a favorite the alt text will be Remove Favorite, and that works without a page refresh. But if you don’t have JavaScript it’ll also work, it’ll just do a full page refresh and mark it as a favorite. And then you could view all your favorites on the favorites page.

And we mentioned before DM stands for Direct Message and there’s a DM link in the main menu, a DM page in Easy Chirp. So that’s a private message. It’s not really a tweet. It’s like an email or something. And that also has to be less than 140 characters and just note that you could only send a DM to somebody that’s following you. And, yeah, also be careful if you’re DMing. Make sure you’re not sending it as a regular tweet because it’ll be public.

So on the Easy Chirp DM page there’s some help text and then the section where you send a DM you just



enter the username and message. And under that is the listings, your timeline of DMs. And by default it’s the inbox. So it’ll have all your incoming DMs. And you can click the sent button. There’s two options. The inbox and sent. And it’ll show you the messages you received and the messages you sent. There is an option to delete a DM under each message. Some Twitter apps don’t have that.

Hash tags. So a hash tag is a word that has a hash or pound sign right before it with no space. And that’s used for searches, basically. So within a tweet or at the end of a tweet you could push hash and a keyword and that’ll kind of mark it as a searchable or keyword in your tweet, and if you click that it’ll be linked in all Twitter apps – or most Twitter apps – and if you click it it’ll take you to a timeline of tweets that include that term. If you click a hash tag in Easy Chirp, it’ll take you to the search results page.

In Easy Chirp there is a search page so from that page you can search tweets and there’s a table of hints there on how to do it or just enter some text. And you could also save searches. So the search page will have your saved searches with terms that’ll be like quick links to your searches. And you could also search users or usernames if you’re trying to find somebody.



Another tool on Twitter and Easy Chirp is lists. A list is a special group of accounts that you create yourself or you could follow other people’s lists, too. If you don’t want to have, say you don’t want to have a whole bunch of companies in your main timeline that you’re following. You could create a special list for media companies or something or whatever you’re into. And you could put those Twitter accounts in that special list so it won’t be in your main timeline. You could just go to that list or another user’s list and follow that for special interests, I guess you can say.

On Easy Chirp’s list page there’s three sections: the create (so you can create a list), my list (which will display your list) and then you could also view the members and subscribers of your list. You can enter a username to add a member. You could edit the settings, like the name of the list and if it’s a public or private list. And there’s also a link to view it on Twitter if you want to view it on Twitter dot com.

And subscribed lists, there’s a section where you can view the lists that you subscribe to. And it’ll also tell you the members and subscribers of those lists and an option to unsubscribe. To subscribe to a list from Easy Chirp it’s a little complex right now. Not too bad. But if you go to a user’s profile page, just click a



username anywhere to go to their profile page and then at the bottom there’s a link to view their lists. And when you view that page, under each of their lists, you just click subscribe and it’ll subscribe you to that list. And then you could go to the list page and view it or view the stats on it.

I know we’re starting to go a little over time. The seminar’s just about over – just a few more slides. Trends. A trend is a popular topic on Twitter. And on Easy Chirp it’ll show you a daily and weekly trends and that data comes from Twitter. Some other Twitter apps have that feature. Apparently on Easy Chirp there is a bug so if you go there it might not be working right at this time, so bear with me.

There’s also a popular links page on Easy Chirp and that data comes from Tweet Meme. And by default it’ll show you the top 15 links from all categories, but you could also select news, images or video to see the top 15 links from those categories on Twitter at the current time. And a few future plans for Easy Chirp and, hopefully, this will be sooner than later but it’s kind of been on hold, so we need to fix that trends page and re-implement some functionality to add an image to a tweet and some other fun things: to show if a specific user is following you or not, enhance the list



functionality with some Ajax, a quick way to report a spammer account.

If you use Easy Chirp, feel free to give me feedback. You can email me at [email protected] or give feedback or contact me on Twitter at @EasyChirp. And also on the home page there’s a Current Tasks list. I try to keep Easy Chirp transparent with what’s going on so it’ll show the top tasks that will be done next and then a wish list of tasks.

I noticed a couple of questions earlier, “What do you think of Qwitter or The Cube? Are there any eye devices that support Twitter voiceover?” So this is the part where I answer those. The Cube and Twitmonger, those are both desktop Twitter clients specifically for screen readers. They only work with screen readers. I don’t even think there’s a visual aspect to it at all. And those two applications are code forks. They come from the application Qwitter, which is no longer being maintained.

So the author of that open sourced it and now there’s a couple of other options that’s for the desktop screen reader-only Twitter application. There’s another accessible Twitter app called TwInbox. A long time ago it was called NickTwit. And it’s actually a plug-in for Outlook, for Microsoft Office’s Outlook. And a Mac



OS X application called YoruFukurou – I think that’s how you pronounce it – or NightOwl in English.

And on the iPhone there’s a pretty good one called TweetList. And that’s supposed to be the most accessible one. So for IOS check that out. TweetList – one word. And I mentioned before there’s also some web based accessible Twitter apps. They’re made for mobile so they’re pretty basic. Not quite as flexible as Easy Chirp but there’s three – and I believe they’re all still active – Slander, Dabr, Tweet.

Okay. So that’s it. In the next session – part two in two weeks – I’ll talk about Twitter, more techniques for your small business and more how-to’s: how to write a great tweet, some ideas for tweets and using hash tags and lists – and what not to do. Okay. So I guess, hopefully, we have time to take a couple of questions.

Larry MuffettYeah. I think we have time for two or three quick questions here. So I’m going to turn the microphone loose and whomever has a question you can go ahead and do that. Those of you without a microphone if you go ahead and put something in the chat box, Dennis can pick up on that, too. So, Dennis



I’m going to turn loose the microphone and if anyone has a question they can go ahead and feed that in.

CallerThanks for a great presentation, Dennis. I’ll be back in two weeks. I just wanted to confirm, did you say you have to sign up for a Twitter account on Twitter? And is my understanding correct that from that point you can maintain and access your Twitter account from your website – from Easy Chirp?

Dennis LembreeYeah. I covered that a little bit at the very beginning of the presentation. To sign up you do have to use Twitter dot com. And someone in the chat, I don’t know if you can use the chat at the beginning. There were a couple of comments on that and that someone had to use a sighted person to help them sign up. So you may have to do that. I think there’s an audio CAPTCHA that’s really bad or something. But thanks for the feedback and I hope you get to sign up and try out Easy Chirp.

Larry MuffettAlright. I want to take this opportunity to remind everybody that today’s seminar, as Dennis mentioned, it’s part one of two parts. And the second part is on March 24th at the same time, 11:00 AM



Central Daylight Savings Time. I also want to remind you all that this seminar, like all Seminars@Hadley, will be archived on our website and available anytime day or night. Each Hadley seminar is now available as a podcast, which you can download to your computer or mobile device. And, hopefully, after listening to today’s excellent presentation please check out the Hadley course listing and seminar archives on some of our other technology topics. Dennis and I certainly want to thank you for participating today. Your questions were outstanding and, I think, added a lot to the presentation.

A couple of things here before I turn this back over to Dennis for some closing comments, Hadley very much values your feedback. So please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar. Give us your suggestions for future seminar topics. You can do that by sending us an email to [email protected]. And you can also help us at the end today. I’m going to put an on screen survey form up and you can fill that out and when you’re done it will take you right out of the chat room. I want to hand the microphone back over to Dennis for a few final comments and then I’m going to come back on and talk to you about the online survey.



Dennis LembreeAnd the @ sign usage. So the pound or the hash character, that’s for searches or for keywords. And then the @ sign, that’s what you use for mentioning usernames. So if you want to mention somebody you put in their username, you always put the @ sign right before their username with no spaces. So if you have a keyword, say, access, you put #access no space. My handle is DennisL. So if you want to tweet me just enter @DennisL space and then your message. Okay, well, I’m going to sign off now. Thanks a lot for the kudos, you guys. Thanks for listening. I had a good time. There’s some great questions. Hopefully, I responded adequately. And I’ll speak to you in two weeks. Thanks again.

Larry Muffett

Thanks, everyone, for coming today. I want to personally thank each and every one of you for taking your time to be a part of this. We definitely appreciate that. Your questions were great, helped make this very interesting for Dennis, I know, and for me also.


2012-02-14-twitter part 1 - hadley · web view2012/02/14 · but when you sign up you’ll have...

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