Exploring visual impairment awareness campaigns on Twitter

Losing the gift of vision has been affecting people’s lives on many fronts. People with visual impairments are susceptible to social isolation due to the lack of public awareness about their needs and abilities. Such lack of awareness also impacts the opportunities available to the visually impaired to be productive members of their society. Global, national, and civil organizations have conducted several annual campaigns to educate the public about the abilities and potential of the visually impaired, raise awareness about the preventable causes of visual impairments, and engage the public in the contemporary efforts to fight preventable blindness. In particular, Twitter is one of the most effective information dissemination platforms in our age, and it has been actively used in such awareness campaigns. In this paper, we aim to analyze the use of Twitter in the impairment awareness campaigns. We organize our analysis in terms of five key concerns: (1) the characteristics of active users during the event, (2) the major players in information dissemination, (3) the tweets’ common topics (4) the reachability of the information, and (5) the temporal tweeting behavior. We report the results of our analysis along with the design of an effective communication strategy of a campaign.