Well it’s more like a day dream that Gojira would rise up with a roar and — this started as a bit of a rant and play at the way Twitter quote / unquote addresses accessibility for tweeted images.
I can’t fix twitter. Even Twitter can’t really fix Twitter. But I can do something about my own habits, and more– as with a helpful nudge I added and changed some features in the TRU Collector SPLOT to better encourage the acts that my vengeful Godzilla would look elsewhere.
In the last year I’ve made more of a focused effort to include alt text for images I tweet. I’m not 100% and am still honing the craft, but I am aiming to be more intentful. Twitter does provide this as a feature — when introduced you actually had to enable this to even use it, but at least now it is the default. I poked around a bit in 2018, tried out a Voice Reader.
Twitter: I can Use Alt Text But I Can’t Do Anything About Other People
I periodically comb through my public feed to do a count of how many of the last 50 tweets with images have alt text (in tweetdeck, it shows up as a tool tip on the image). The count is usually single digit.
And here is a sad fact- when Twitter uses opengraph tags to make those pretty preview of links, it ignores the alt text, even then it is included in my blog’s metadata. The tweet does not include the alt text–
But here it is in the HTML source of my post
Here’s the thing about, broken, wretched, despicable twitter. Good things end up coming out of it. I forgot who retweeted this thread, but it is so chock full of useful information for making tweeted images more accessible… well it’s worth framing. No, it’s worth more than that.
One of the useful bits from this thread is the @AltTextReminder account. Follow it/them, and if you tweet an image that lacks an alt text, you will get a DM letting you know (without shaming you). So I did some tests…
First I tweeted a photo that I added Alt text — in the web and mobile client Twitter now displays an indicator ALT in the lower left corner if it exists (before this the only way to know was to use a screen reader or to inspect the HTML)
and a second one without the Alt text.
Sure enough I got a notification.
As behavior modification goes, this is pretty effective!
Since twitter does have all it’s data, it would not be too hard to report how low the usage rate of this feature is (if I had better API chops I might be able to figure it out), but I would guess it is like less than 4% of images in twitter have alt text. Can we bug them to report this?
SPLOT: I can help other people use Alt Text
I cannot fix twitter, but on my own web sites, and especially the WordPress themes I hack at, well I can make a difference. Previously I had added a field to enter alt text where images are uploaded for the SPLOT themes TRU Writer, TRU Collector, and SPLOTbox. In all cases it was an optional field. The first two did not explicitly indicate its presence, but for SPLOTbox I had it displayed in the content’s metadata (leaving room for the field to be used to describe audio or video content):
Earlier this week I got an email from Jessica Motherwell McFarlane who uses the TRU Collector for a very clever approach to teaching how to express ideas in comic form (see one example with 168 student shared drawings)– in fact (here we got SPLOT meta) you can hear her audio description in a SPLOTbox powered site I made at the OpenETC (and see that media description in action).
Since she was requiring students to enter Alt text for their uploaded comics, she was asking for a way to be able to check that it was done. She had noticed the featured images on the home page displayed on a hover over the image th title of the post. But that is not using the image alt text, that us the hyperlink’s description parameter.
It did not take long for me to jump into the code and provide a way to have TRU Collector display what was entered for the Alt text like SPLOTbox does. She was pleased with that, but was asking about being able to make changes to the labels I had used.
So with some more thought, I realized that was all possible with a few more updates to the Customizer options, which already allow a SPLOT owner to modify both the labels and the instructions for the form fields where a visitor enters their stuff. I made it so a site owner could change the label and the directions for where the alt text is entered.
You can see it in action on this version of TRU Collector https://splot.ca/collector/
Here is the Customizer showing the default label and directions for the Alt text field:
But now you can change both of these! The Godzilla reference is explained eventually.
Before we get to the Green One, maybe you noticed that on the form field it says “required”– yes, I added a TRU Collector theme option so as a site owner you can require users to enter alt text for images:
So while Twitter makes it optional to use alt images for shared images with no recourse to change it, as the owner of a SPLOT powered site you can have that power… an awesome, giant lizard like power.
The reference (and the title of this blog post) come from the example I added to the SPLOT to show this new feature– check it out to see this new feature in action.
While in there, I made some more minor updates in the meta data display, so it uses the same customizer powered label edits that are used on the form field. I also cleaned up some minor issues in the attribution generator. This is all available at the source of the TRU Collector theme… I will have to see if I can get Reclaim Hosting to bump their version for the quick installs of these theme. I might have snuck it onto the openETC (don’t tell Troy Welch)
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
with apologies to Blue Oyster Cult
He pulls the images lacking alt text down
Clueless twitter on a half-baked feature train
Scream bug-eyed as he looks in on them
Update September 13, 2021
Let’s hear it for people that still read blogs!
I could not find any references to twitter offering this as a service. I did find a Google Chrome extension that sounds like it uses Microsoft AI to add image descriptions on the client side.
And the same developer offers a twitter bot @A11yImage that sounds like it will try to generate the same for a tweeted image… but that seems roundabout as it needs a tweeted image to get a description that you can then use for a new tweet?
It seems easier just to add them at the point of origin. But then again, what do I know? I like Godzilla toys.
More Experimentation (later the same day)
So I tried this- I tweeted the same fun godzilla photo without Alt text
And right away, @AltTextReminder dutifly scolded me by DM for tweeting an image without Alt Text. So then I replied to said tweet with @A11yImage which is supposed to generate alt text for me. It responded quickly— with Japanese text.
I do like that it includes the link to twitter’s info. But what about those “other pages with the same image”? It does not report the source, but I know because it came up in my own search results, it’s from PxHere an image site that harvest heaps of my CC licensed flickr images. PxHere now at least provides my name as attribution if the original is CC-BY, minimal compliance, but no link to the original. I’m able to use Google Translate on the bot’s suggested alt text- it’s merely the list of tags from PxHere.
So is this good alt text? Is it better than nothing? It’s not horrible, but is it actually useful? I cannot answer. And it does not affect the original, but I expect as a reply in twitter it is loosely attached.
I am not ready to let bots do the work humans ought to be doing in the first place.
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