Millions of people use the internet every day, including those who spend most hours of waking up on social media. It might surprise some people, but not all of these users can see pictures or read text easily. People who experience visual impairments often rely on accessibility features, unfortunately, sometimes there is no or very cannot be used on several platforms.
One of the biggest causes is a humble image, which naturally requires a number of visions to adequate adequately. In the ideal world, pictures on the web all have text descriptions so that everyone can benefit from them, but not all platforms make it easy to add this kind of text. Social networks are very bad when it comes to this kind of accessibility feature, but Twitter finally takes big steps that will make the platform more accessible for everyone, including those who might not be able to see what happened to their schedule.
Alt, short for “alternative text,” has been around since the early days of the web; It is a way to use a piece of text to describe images and are especially designed to function as a placeholder if there is a picture failed to load or if the web browser does not support displaying images at all. This ability eventually becomes an important accessibility feature that the screen reader will use to talk descriptions of images for blind users.
Although this is the best practice to provide alt text for images that you upload to a page or social networking, it is not always easy to do, especially when the platform does not make the feature easily visible. Starting today, Twitter launched two important improvements related to this, starting with the badge of “Alt” which stands out in the corner of the image that carries the description of the text. Clicking or tapping this badge will trigger a popup description, which can be used by a screen reader or just to provide additional information about an image.
Twitter also makes it easier to add a description to the photo. Although it is possible to add descriptive text on Twitter since 2016, the feature is easy to miss. Now there is a “added description” button that is very visible and the “+ alt” badge on the cellphone to contact your attention on simple but very helpful actions.
Interestingly, you can add text up to 1,000 characters for image descriptions – more than you can publish in ordinary tweets. It is not difficult to imagine some users can take advantage of this freedom to exceed the 280-character platform limit, but people must object to what Alt made in the first place. No one wants to listen to an amble 1,000 characters that are barely related to the photo he explained, especially when voiced hard by the screen reader.
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