It was in 2016 when Twitter began to allow users to include alternative texts to the images they publish in their tweets so that people with vision problems can have a reference to the content of the images of the tweets they read through devices. screen reading.
But since it is something optional, on many occasions alternative texts have not been added to the images published in tweets, so until April of this year it has been a complicated task to know which published images contain alternative text for the images that do not.
Encouraging the inclusion of alternative text to images
But these measures have been insufficient for accessibility advocates and for groups of people with vision problems, who have been pushing for the platform to add reminders to be shown to all those users at the moment they are going to post a tweet. with image or images that have not included alternative text.
As well, Twitter now take the witness starting to test the reminders for the inclusion of alternative texts to the images that they have included in the same tweet, starting initially with a small group of users on Android, iOS and on the web, with the idea of expanding the group of users over the next few weeks.
The idea consists of display a pop-up window as a reminder, similar to the way of recommending reading a content before retweeting it, just when you want to publish a tweet that has included one or more images and on which they do not yet have alternative text.
Users will have the possibility to add the relevant description or to omit the inclusion, being an optional function that users can activate or deactivate from the configuration options. By default it is disabled, although Twitter will also encourage its activation.
The reminder pop-up text says the following:
Good descriptions are concise but detailed. Don’t forget to summarize or transcribe the text that appears in the image itself. Your caption makes Twitter accessible to people with disabilities and anyone who wants more context. You can disable this reminder in the accessibility settings.
Once it reaches all users, it will be the decision of each one to have this function to try to make it easier for people with vision problems to have a better idea of the content that is shown in the images shared in the tweets.
