Social media should be accessible to everyone. Screen readers and braille technology do a great job with text posts, but until now images have been out of reach for the visually impaired. Facebook has been working on a tech solution, but it is Twitter that first came up with a solution: letting users add text descriptions to the images we share on the platform.
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As on most social media platforms, adding images to your tweets helps to increase engagement on your content. Although visually-impaired people still cannot “see” your images, the text description will be a massive addition to their experience, and help them better understand the context of what you are sharing.
Of course, on top of making Twitter a more accessible platform, Venture Beat explained that a text description will also have a huge impact on search engine rankings.
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To enable this feature, go to your accessibility settings on Twitter, and select the compose image descriptions option. The next time you add an image to a Tweet, each thumbnail in the composer will have an add description button.
Featured image credit: Max Fleishman