Twitter is taking a step toward making its service more accessible to visually impaired users. The company is launching support for alternative texts to accompany images across its iOS and Android apps, which means that any image descriptions will be available to those using screen readers, VentureBeat reports.
This feature can be used by not only the service’s 320 million monthly active users, but also by publishers and developers — Twitter has updated its REST API and Twitter Cards for the occasion.
When you enable the feature through Twitter’s accessibility settings, the thumbnail of any image you tweet will contain an “add description” button that, when tapped, will open up a dialogue box. Here you can include a description of up to 420 characters.
In 2006, when Twitter was a text-only service, its “content was easily accessible to people who are visually impaired,” the company said in a blog post, adding, “Over the years, we’ve extended the platform to support a range of media, but we haven’t provided our users and developers with the tools to provide alternative text to images in tweets.”
To emphasize why this update is important to developers, Twitter explained that the community has tried to solve this problem before. In 2014, a workaround was created to allow EasyChirp users to post short and long descriptions of images. Then there was the Alt Text Bot, which allowed people to mention @alt_text_bot in a tweet or retweet with an attached image to receive a reply containing a text description, VentureBeat says.
