Twitter has rolled out a feature that will be beneficial for the blind and visually impaired individuals. From now onwards, they will be able to read images that are added with the tweets with its new image description reminder.
Moreover, the company has said in a statement that, the new image description reminder will motivate more individuals on the Twitter to add helpful descriptions to the images as they tweet.
Alternative Text or alt text is nothing but the description of the image contents, which will be further fetched by screen reader software used by visually impaired people.
Whenever, you will use a photo in a tweet, you will get the option to add an alt text, also termed as digital image description.
“Our new image description reminder is a feature that prompts you to make a good habit of adding alt text to every image you upload and share on Twitter,” said the company.
After it gets enabled, it does not matter whether you will use Twitter on web or mobile you will be reminded by the platform to add an alternative text whenever you will add image to your tweet.
“We’re rolling out our new image description reminder globally, and most people on Twitter have access to it already (those who don’t will have it very soon),” Twitter announced.
Those image descriptions are not only helpful to people with screen readers, but also to those people who live in a place where internet connectivity is poor. Those descriptions will also be helpful to people who wish to learn more about the image.
“Image descriptions help describe the image to people who aren’t able to view it, so it’s important to keep the text focused: capture what’s important, be succinct, and be objective,” informed Twitter.
Adding to this, pictures that have the descriptions will show up with an ALT badge present in the lower left corner. This will indicate the users on Twitter that additional descriptive text is present for the image.
Also, the social media giant has recently added a Closed Captions toggle button, an ALT badge as well as captions for audio conversations on Spaces and Voice Tweets.