Thread by @RichTatum

An interesting #accessibility development from Twitter: image alt text now exceeds the Tweet character limit by more than 3.5x: 1K characters! Finally you can describe images & GIFs in glorious detail—and hide your ranting such that only users with assistive devices will notice!

https://twitter.com/TwitterA11y/status/1263593277820858370

Here is a test of the 1000 character limit Twitter has introduced to the alt description of attached images.

I’ve included the text in the attached image in case you can’t view it on your device. As you can see, I have questions!

#twitter #accessibility

Questions: Is the alt searchable on Twitter? I’ve never noticed alt text on the mobile app. How can we view them? If there is inflammatory, dangerous, hurtful text in the alt text, will the algorithms flag it?

#twitter #accessibility

More questions: Will we be able to report abusive alt texts? What kinds of abuses would be actionable? Will Google/Bing index the text?

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. ツ

#twitter #accessibility

If anybody is using assistive screen reading devices and is reading this thread, I would be very interested in knowing whether all of that Magna Carta was read aloud!

#twitter #accessibility

PS: It does not appear that the text inside the alt description is searchable on Twitter.

#twitter #accessibility

The alt description is not “additional marketing real estate.” Ugh #a11y

https://twitter.com/inclusivestyle/status/1263621554551701505?s=21

https://twitter.com/inclusivestyle/status/1263621554551701505

Some behind-the-scenes insight about the dialog happening at Twitter when considering expanding the image alt attribute feature to 1,000 characters.

(Discussion:

https://twitter.com/tlhInganHom/status/1223380449281572867

)