It’s an image that’s been looping for several days on Twitter: a white rectangle accompanied by a pointing black arrow at the bottom left of the image and a “Click Here” message. The user is then invited to click on the “ALT” button, located at the bottom of each image posted on the social network, which usually reveals a joke.
Brands, personalities or anonymous people have been lending themselves to the game of hidden messages for several days. A trend that, however, does not attract blind people or people with vision problems.
accessibility problem
Because basically, the “ALT” function allows, when posting an image on Twitter, to fill in a precise description of the image. The goal is to make the image more accessible to blind people, so they can understand the nature of the photo using their “screen readers.” This assistance software is used on smartphones to help with accessibility, in particular by allowing people to read what is displayed on the screen through a synthesis of speech.
Many Internet users have thus expressed their discontent with this trend, which they consider “inappropriate”. Some even revealed the consequences of this bad joke: almost thirty seconds of uninterrupted noise to transcribe the joke of the “Tweets of cats” account that had indicated 200 “MEOW” as a description of their image.
Keep in mind that alternative descriptions for images on Twitter can contain up to 1,000 characters, enough to create complete captions and really useful for people with visual impairments.
Source: BFM TV
