JAKARTA - Did you know that if all tweets on Twitter, made by users, are not necessarily read by all netizens. For those with special needs, such as the visually impaired, reading posts in the form of images and even voiceless videos is a musthail thing. But now it's starting to be reduced by Twitter.
Twitter is now expanding features that make images on their platform more accessible to people who use screen readers, such as the visually impaired. Alternative text reminder features were first announced in July but are only available to a small group of users. Now all users around the world will be able to activate the feature this week.
Alternative text, or text alt, is a written description of the contents of images that can be picked up by screen reader software used by blind internet users. Without alternative text, countless images posted and retweeted daily on Twitter are inaccessible to people who can't experience it visually.
The introduction of alternative text reminders has long emerged, as disabled activists and their allies have lobbied Twitter to provide more tools around alternative text and have asked users who can see for more consistent by adding alternative text to images.
Volunteers for Twitter bot developers have even made reminders of DIY's alternative text in recent years. They are inspired by demands for the platform to be more accessible to anyone.
giving you all Twitter Circle because sometimes your Tweets aren’t for everyone add up to 150 people to yours and use it. please. pic.twitter.com/D6AE4OhRX5
— Twitter (@Twitter) August 30, 2022
The three phone screens show how to enable alternative text reminders. The first is the appearance of the accessibility page in the settings, with the active switch to "accept image description reminders." The second is a pop up that appears before a tweet without a caption added, reminding the user to add an image description. The third is an alt text that appears in front of a tweet, with an image description that the text alt has added to make it visible by clicking the ALT badge at the bottom corner of the image.
Twitter realizes an alternative text reminder feature is something users want for a while.
If it was up to us, we would stick fingers and the world would be accessible we understand that this has come a long time ago, said Gerard Cohen, software engineering manager at Twitter's accessibility experience team. We are very grateful to the bot maker, the people who have advanced and did so.
Alternative text hangers will participate, meaning users must log in to their account settings to enable the command, which will be synchronized across the device. You only need to activate it once.
Once the reminder is active, users will get a ping whenever they add an image without alternative text, asking them to come back and add a description before posting a tweet.
Cohen said the launch of a limited reminder had been celebrated, and people were happy to see Twitter creating that built-in system. But some users have questioned how helpful the reminder would be if they chose to participate instead of being enabled by default, saying only people know about new accessibility updates know to enable reminders.
We accidentally tried to exclude anyone by making this participation. We know that this is a process for everyone," Cohen said in response to feedback. This is just the first step. We will continue to repeat and learn from this.
Cohen said making a reminder feature available to everyone is a priority, and the company will work to educate people on how to properly use alternative captions.
Other features such as the ability to edit tweets and add retroactive alt text is also a highly requested accessibility update. According to Cohen, this is being explored by his team.
On Twitter, image descriptions can be seen by everyone and may be useful for users who can see images but need help to process what is displayed. When an alternative text is added to an image, the user can click on the ALT badge in the lower left corner of the image to read the description provided by the author.
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