Do you make use of Twitter’s alt text option when you upload images? If you don’t, you should! Now, Twitter’s going to prompt you to do exactly this, with new pop-ups being shown to some users alerting them about the benefits of alternative text summaries within Tweets.

Alternate Your Steps

With the alert themselves, Twitter’s looking to get more users to consider adding alt-text by basically explaining why text descriptions of images are important, along with how they can help more people engage with their content.

Text descriptions are a key tool for the visually impaired, with screen readers able to communicate these descriptions to add relevant context. Twitter users can add text descriptions to any uploaded image or GIF. One downside, if you would even call it that, is that including these required manual effort – hence these new prompts.

Twitter has been looking to improve its alt-text descriptions for some time now, as part of its broader efforts to improve accessibility in the app. Twitter added a dedicated ‘+Alt’ button that’s displayed on the image itself back in 2020 to encourage more awareness of the option. It updated the feature in March of this year, with a new ‘+Alt’ badge now automatically added to images where alt-text descriptions are available.

Twitter also expanded its text description window, making it more accessible. Combined, these have put significantly more focus on alt-text for Tweeted images, although Twitter could go further by adding more auto-generated text descriptions where alt-text content isn’t available.

It’s not perfect, but it does help provide a better experience, and rather than hoping that users add their own info when prompted, it ensures that there will be text descriptions available for all content. Twitter’s prompts may also help provide more accurate descriptions, with the downside of not being available at scale, as users can easily ignore these and gloss over them.

Maybe, the next stage is more about moving in line with the approach of other platforms, making use of automated object identification, which can also have additional benefits in a range of applications and processes.

The Wrap 

Whether Twitter will actually consider this a focus or not is hard to say as no one really knows what the key developmental strategy for the app will be moving forward. The current ownership issue involving a certain billionaire isn’t making things any clearer, unfortunately. Regardless, if Twitter is after the improvement of accessibility for its tools, then this makes for a good extra step.

Twitter’s new alt text prompts are being rolled out to a small group of users on iOS, Android, and web from today. Twitter will expand the prompts to more users over the coming weeks.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3Rsu71Y