Majed Al Zayer
ABSTRACT
People with visual impairments have been surrounded with myths and misconceptions that have made it challenging for them to live as productive members of the society and have partly contributed in making the majority live in substandard living conditions. To shift the public's focus from being on the disability to be on the abilities of the visually impaired, non-profit organizations and government agencies have conducted a series of campaigns to spread awareness about visual impairments. Social media platforms, such as Twitter, has become the primary channel to diffuse information to the public. The goal of this paper is to analyze the use of Twitter as a social media platform to spread information during visual impairments awareness campaigns. We focused our analysis on five key concerns: (i) the characteristics of active users during the event, (ii) the major players in information dissemination, (iii) the tweets' common topics (iv) the reachability of information, and (v) the temporal tweeting behavior. We report the results of the campaigns along with the design of an effective communication strategy of a campaign.
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