The new Twitter text screengrabs are handy. What are the accessibility implications?

From a functional standpoint, I like what Medium is doing by making it easy to add screengrab text images to tweets. Those text snippets can add some important context to a tweet (and make it a lot more, or less, likely that I’ll click through to the link).

The growing use of screengrabbed text on Twitter is a bigger phenomenon than Medium. And it’s had me thinking for a while.

One of the nice things about Twitter has been its focus on text, and therefore its accessibility for the visually impaired. True, people are sharing a lot of images too, and increasingly a lot of text on images that aren’t accessible, and Twitter doesn’t have the equivalent of an “alt” attribute. (Arguably, when it comes to the Inspiring Quote™ genre, that’s a mercy.)

But the text-based screengrab takes that to a whole new level, because the content that it’s sharing is, in fact, text. It ought to be machine-readable.

Now, accessibility isn’t my jam. People more versed in this than I can tell me if there newest generation of hardware and software for the visually impaired include text recognition features.

If this isn’t an issue, well and good. But if it is (and I suspect that’s the case), then we need to think a little about how screengrabbed text excludes some people. Medium folks and others, what has your thinking been on this?