Equal Entry believes that authoring tools should be available on all social media platforms, so that the content can be made accessible to everyone. Here is Thomas Logan, Equal Entry CEO, with a one-minute video on the subject.
Transcript:
Instagram does not have a method to describe an image for people who are blind or low vision. When you upload a photo to Instagram, it will have no description. It could be anything. However, the same image uploaded to Facebook will be described as, “Image may contain one person, hat.” Facebook provides automatic descriptions for all images that are uploaded through object recognition.
These automatic descriptions aren’t quite ready to be able to identify a microphone wearing a hat and scarf. Or, that I’m smiling with my arm around the microphone. On Facebook and Instagram, I have to include these descriptions as part of the text of my post.
On Twitter, I can include the image description separate from the text of my tweet. I believe having a method to directly add description for images is good design for accessible social media. What accessibility feature requests do you have for social media?
Good news from Instagram, they have added ability to add ‘alt’ text to images: https://instagram-press.com/blog/2018/11/28/creating-a-more-accessible-instagram/