This one little change to your tweets will make a huge difference to blind Twitter users
Blind veteran Rob Long had an overwhelming response to his polite request that people make a quick change so they can use image descriptions.
A blind Twitter user who asked people on the social media platform to make a slight change to their settings to enrich his experience online has received an overwhelming response.
Veteran Rob Long wrote a Twitter thread explaining how – and why – people should turn on a feature called “caption description”.
The change won’t just benefit him but thousands of blind people who use Twitter with text-to-speech translators.
His initial tweet, which has been shared and liked more than 200,000 times, explained that adding a description to an image is “really simple and makes a huge difference to our Twitter experience”.
In a later post, he explained that usually when the screen reader gets to a picture it simply reads out a placeholder phrase akin to “here is an image”, without explaining what it is.
With the accessibility feature enabled, the uploader is able to add a description.
The additional description doesn’t count against character count and is only revealed via screenreader technology.
Descriptions can be added to each picture in a tweet, but not for gifs or video.
Since posting his polite request, Long has been inundated by people telling him they have turned the feature on and confirming they will be using it in the future.
Long’s passionate tweet has been welcomed by Eleanor Southwood, chair of the RNIB and a regular Twitter user who is registered blind.
She said: “Social media is a really powerful way of bringing people together.
“That’s why RNIB is encouraging everyone to activate and use this feature so pictures shared on Twitter are accessible to everyone.”
Facebook uses automatic alternative text – known as alt text, it explains on its accessibility pages. It uses object recognition technology to create a description of a photo for the blind and vision-loss community.
