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this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I deleted a tweet yesterday about twitter finally allowing alt descriptions on images in 2022 - 25 years after they were added to the w3c spec (7 years before twitter existed) . But I added the point that OCR recommendations for screenshots of text has kinda always been possible, as long as they reliably detect that it's a screenshot of text. But thinking about the politics of that overwhelmed me, hence the delete.
Like, I'm kinda sure they already OCR all the images uploaded for meta info, but the context problem would always be there from an accessibility POV.
My perspective is that without any assistance to people unaware of accessibility issues with images beyond "would you like to add an alt description" leaves the politics of it all between the people using twitter. I don't really like seeing people being berated for not adding alt text to their image as if twitter is not the third-party that cultivated a community for 17 years without ALT descriptions, then they suddenly throw them out there and let us deal with it amongst ourselves.
Anyway... I will stick to what I know in future
read that back and it's a bit of an unreadable brain-dump. Apologies if it's nonsense
Yah, this makes sense. Community conventions can encourage good accessible content creation, and software can have affordances to do the same. Twitter, for many years, has been the opposite. Not only did it not allow alt, but the shorthand and memes and joke templates that grew up on short form Twitter was an extremely visual language. Emoji-based ascii art, gifs, animated gifs, gifs framed in emoji captioned by zalgo glitch unicode characters… there’s HTML that can make all that accessible, in theory, but the problem is more structural than that.