How We Can Make Twitter More Accessible For Everyone!

I’ve been working in the area of disability rights and inclusion for a few years now, often calling out the Government (of India) for discriminating and not implementing legal provisions.

But it was extremely embarrassing when I posted an image on Twitter once and someone wrote back to me saying they couldn’t read the alt-text on it. And he couldn’t, well, because there wasn’t any!

At the time I had either missed out on Twitter’s accessibility update or I was just plain careless — they’re both excuses. We often point fingers on companies and governments when it comes to website accessibility but forget (knowingly or not) the small things we can do as individuals to make our content inclusive for all.

In this post, I focus specifically on Twitter. About the little things we can do as users and consumers of the internet to ensure our content reaches everyone.

Twitter

In 2016, Twitter made an update which would allow users to add captions to images. Research already exists to show how tweets with images receives a larger user engagement than those without. By adding the option of image description, Twitter opened up it’s platform to a whole bunch of users who were tweeting but could not interpret the thousands of images shared every day.

The update gives a user the option to describe an image they are tweeting using 420 characters. This limit is different from the 280 character limit that Twitter opened up to all it’s users recently.

How does it work?

1. Click on your profile icon and select Settings and Privacy from the drop down menu. For a shortcut press the g key followed quickly by the s key.
2. Click on Accessibility from the list of settings.
3. Here you will find a checkbox which says compose image descriptions. Check the box to turn this setting on.

Screenshot of Twitter’s accessibility page. Text reads Image description with a checkbox to turn the setting for alternate text on or off. Another accessibility setting shown here is a checkbox to turn video autoplay on or off.

4. Next step — Start tweeting. When you add an image to your tweet, you will find an option of add description. Click on it and it will take you to a description box where you detail out the image as much as possible. Description can be upto 420 characters. Once you’re done, click on apply. This will take you back to the original ‘Compose Tweet’ space where you can add text, tag people without having compromised on the character limit.

Screenshot of an empty compose box on twitter. An image of a cloudy blue sky with a tent on a beach is placed below the compose box.

Screenshot of an image description box on twitter. The image is that of fluffy clouds in the sky and a tent on the beach. In the background is another tent. Below the image is an image description box which details out the image as described here. Next to the description box is a apply button.

A few other tips for twitter accessibility —

1. Place your hashtags and mentions at the end of your tweet. This helps a lot in avoiding confusing texts and makes screen readers to voice the main content clearly at the beginning.
2. Use CamelCase also known as bicapitalisation for hashtags with multiple words. This simply means, capitalize the first letters of compound words. For example, #WebAccessibility and not #webaccessibility.
3. As much as possible, try avoiding unfamiliar acronyms. If you have character limit left, spell out the acronyms. Sometimes, acronyms are read out by screen readers in a very strange manner leaving the text undecipherable.

It’s that easy! It’s simply a matter of making accessibility a habit, not a task.