Twitter has announced that its testing new accessibility features to make alt text descriptions significantly more useful and prominent for everyone on the platform. With the change, images that have descriptions will be given a badge that says “alt,” and clicking on that badge will show the description.
According to Twitter, around 3 percent of users will get to try out the new features for a month, and it’ll roll out globally at the beginning of April. Until then, it seems like most people still won’t have access to alt text descriptions unless they’re using a screen reader. On an account without the new features, it’s difficult to access alt text without a screen reader.
On an account with the features, it’s as easy as clicking a box.
As Twitter notes, users have waited a while for this functionality. Image descriptions were introduced in 2016, but they haven’t been particularly prominent on the platform — it’s relatively easy to miss the button that lets you add one. That may be because of how Twitter handled accessibility features in the past. Up until late 2020, employees had to volunteer to work on them alongside their regular jobs, and there wasn’t a team dedicated to making Twitter easier to use for those who needed it most. Since the team’s creation, Twitter has added live captions to voice tweets and videos.
It’s possible that making it obvious when an image has alt text could make the feature more popular — if people can clearly see which pictures do and don’t have it, they may think to add it next time they post one. Twitter mentioned that the accessibility team is also working on an “image description reminder,” which could help make alt text even more popular on the platform.
