Things Twitter Should Invent: retain hashtag capitalization

When you search for or click on a hashtag in Twitter, it shows you a feed of all tweets with that hashtag.  Useful!

If you then click on the "Tweet" button while this hashtag feed is open, it populates the tweet composition box with the hashtag in question, on the assumption that you're going to tweet using the hashtag in question. Useful!

Problem: Sometimes the hashtag that populates the tweet composition box is written in all lowercase, even if the hashtag you originally searched on or clicked on was written in a combination of capital and lowercase.

This is an issue because screen readers use the capitalization in hashtags to determine when a new word starts, and writing hashtags in all lowercase makes the screen reader attempt to pronounce the hashtag as all one word. And, aside from that, #CapitalizingEachWordLikeThis is easier to read than #writingthewholethinginlowercase.

What Twitter should do: make sure that any capitalization in the hashtag clicked on or searched for is retained when populating the tweet composition box. This means people who have already made the effort to make their hashtags accessible don't have to repeat that effort every time they tweet.

While writing this blog post, I tried to determine the specific conditions under which Twitter retains the capitalization of the hashtag versus when it changes it to all lowercase, and I wasn't able to pinpoint it with any consistency. All I can tell you is sometimes it retains capitalization, and sometimes it goes all lowercase.

However, the fact that it sometimes retains capitalization means that retaining capitalization is technologically possible, so Twitter should make that happen all the time.