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I've been in a discussion started by @bennesb about the two edged sword of inaccessibility online where
thing needed for some disabled people to access content
=
thing that is harder or impossible for some disabled people to generate
I want to summarize and flesh out in a
thing needed for some disabled people to access content
=
thing that is harder or impossible for some disabled people to generate
I want to summarize and flesh out in a
Our case study is going to be alt text and image descriptions, both of which create access for Blind people and disabled people with visual and visual processing impairments.
In a 2019 analysis of 1 million media tweets by @colegleason et al, 0.1% had alt text.
In a 2019 analysis of 1 million media tweets by @colegleason et al, 0.1% had alt text.
This is abysmal and represents an extreme lack of access to community and information on twitter. This is a huge deal, and members of the disabled community like @may_gun have been documenting how this represents from hiring discrimination to inaccessible public health info
Alt text (at least from my perspective) has become kind of a cornerstone issue in internet accessibility. On twitter in particular, an individual including it at the get go is the most efficient and most effective way to ensure access, especially with screenshots of text.
Truly, this is largely an issue of abled people not taking the time to copy and paste or link or give a couple sentence image description. But in our fights for access, disabled people tend to gain more traction with disabled people who also know exclusion and want to go better.
Which brings us to the second access issue - there are disabled people who face barriers to provide alt text. https://twitter.com/bennessb/status/1361285999112949766?s=20
These people are varied! Some of them are hypermobile and have added pain typing. Some have mobility or motor issues. Some have trouble recalling words. There are many many reasons this can be a struggle. And these people, which includes me depending on the day, need access too.
So if you are abled and got this far - please, please, do your part and make the problem a little smaller.
And if you are disabled and still here, I want to talk about some of our options, what their drawbacks are, and what we should keep in mind as we brainstorm.
And if you are disabled and still here, I want to talk about some of our options, what their drawbacks are, and what we should keep in mind as we brainstorm.
One tool I discovered last night is @A11yImage which is invoked by #DescribeImage. If alt text already exists, it will pull it... but if it doesn't it will do it's best to create it through a number of methods. It does pretty good at extracting text from screenshots too.
One of the problems though, is that alt text is most useful when it is directly attached to an image. Twitter is a place where things are shared and altered and alt text that exists as a reply or a reply to a reply is much less likely to be found -- and also requires digging
When so few tweets have alt text, there isn't enough confidence for users to expect to find it if they spend time looking, and multiplying that time looking across every tweet with media is totally unreasonable. So our goal should be to have this alt text tied to the image.
Maybe second best is as part of the original thread - I defer to those who rely on alt text more than me to decide that.
Operating only within twitter, those who need too could tweet with #/DescribeImage and then copy paste and edit the bot's reply as alt text on a new tweet and delete the original. Or copy paste edit as an additional tweet in the original thread.
For desktop users, there is the chrome extension "Auto Alt Text" but it cannot extract text and it takes over your screen - if your images are already online before you share them though, it means you can get a base for creating your own alt text before tweeting.
I'd love to see abled people getting more engaged with alt text and step up to help - the original discussion this morning included the idea of a hashtag to request help in creating alt text and image descriptions, but lack of ally engagement just leads to more disabled burnout
And of course, as @bennessb has said, this is a systemic issue, and efforts from twitter to invest in tools that increase access for creators and consumers of content is necessary if we are to take the burden off disabled people.
And I wouldn't be surprised if by the time I send these tweets she has already summed up the mornings discussion. But anyways, listen to each other within the community, be gentle within the community, pursue community solutions as a stop gap but know this isn't really our mess.
