Disability and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Using Twitter to Understand Accessibility during Rapid Societal Transition
Cole Gleason, Stephanie Valencia, Lynn Kirabo, Jason Wu, Anhong Guo, Elizabeth Jeanne Carter, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Cynthia Bennett, Amy Pavel · 2020 · Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020) · doi:10.1145/3373625.3417023
Summary
This Carnegie Mellon University study uses Twitter data to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected people with disabilities (PWD) across three critical domains where technology and accessibility intersect: grocery delivery services, remote education, and public health information dissemination. The researchers collected tweets using 59 search terms related to disability and the pandemic from April 2020, sampling 7,877 tweets about grocery delivery, 1,244 about education, and 544 about public health messaging. They supplemented the Twitter analysis with follow-up investigations of specific sectors — surveying the COVID-19 policies of the largest grocery chains in the US and UK (Kroger, Albertson's, Walmart, Target, Food Lion, Tesco, Sainsbury's), examining the accessibility of major online education platforms, and auditing alternative text usage on public health department Twitter accounts across all 50 US states. The study is framed around the observation that rapid societal transitions consistently impose disproportionate burdens on PWD because accessibility is treated as an afterthought rather than built into systems from the start. The authors argue that organizations should create flexible, accessible technology and policies during calm periods so they can adapt effectively during crises, rather than scrambling to retrofit accessibility when it is too late.
Key findings
The grocery delivery analysis revealed that while all major retailers introduced priority shopping hours and expanded delivery, only two chains (Tesco and Sainsbury's in the UK) offered meaningful prioritization of delivery slots for high-risk individuals, using government-curated vulnerability lists. Most US retailers' prioritization policies were vague or nonexistent, forcing disabled customers to individually contact companies or tag government officials on Twitter to secure basic necessities. The education analysis identified four major themes: approximately 20% of tweets discussed social-emotional learning resources; students with disabilities shared personal challenges including universities ignoring pre-pandemic accommodation requirements; roughly 25% of tweets shared resources for making online content accessible; and there was significant discussion of whether video conferencing platforms supported captioning and screen readers. A striking finding was that accommodations previously denied to disabled students (remote attendance, flexible deadlines) were suddenly granted to everyone during the pandemic. For public health messaging, the researchers found that before the pandemic only 8 of 55 US state health department Twitter accounts used alternative text on images, with just 63% of images having alt text. During the pandemic, only 4 additional states adopted the feature. Face mask mandates created severe communication barriers for DHH people who rely on lip-reading, and government press briefings frequently lacked sign language interpreters. An audit of state COVID-19 websites found that 48 of 50 had common accessibility issues including low-contrast text (41/50), empty links (31/50), and missing alt text (12/50). Across all three domains, the authors identified four recurring patterns: existing problems magnified by the pandemic, existing solutions lacking emergency substitutes, emergency measures not considering accessibility, and improvements that emerged only because a pandemic forced them.
Relevance
This paper provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of how rapid societal change exposes and amplifies accessibility failures, making it essential reading for anyone involved in emergency preparedness, policy design, or accessible technology development. The central argument — that accessibility must be built into systems during calm times rather than retrofitted during crises — has implications far beyond COVID-19, applying to any scenario where institutions must rapidly transition services online or alter delivery models. For accessibility practitioners, the detailed audit of grocery store policies and state health department social media practices provides a replicable methodology for evaluating organizational accessibility readiness. The finding that only 8 of 55 US state health agencies used image alt text on Twitter before the pandemic is a stark illustration of how basic accessibility practices remain unimplemented even by government agencies with legal obligations. The education findings reinforce the case for Universal Design for Learning over individual accommodation models — when everything was forced online, the accommodation-on-request approach collapsed entirely. The paper also highlights the role of social media as both a research tool and an advocacy platform for disability communities, demonstrating how Twitter enables real-time visibility into accessibility failures that would otherwise remain invisible to researchers and policymakers.
Tags: COVID-19 · disability · social media · Twitter · emergency preparedness · online education · grocery delivery · public health · deaf · hard of hearing · visual impairment · digital divide · Universal Design for Learning
Standards referenced: ADA · IDEA