Twitter releases image captions feature as part of its accessibility drive

In its bid to fetch refined image descriptions to its social media platform, Twitter has made its ‘ALT’ badge available globally. Twitter announced the ‘ALT text’ feature last month and is now rolling it out globally. Users now get to provide detailed image descriptions for their posts on the social media platform more prominently.

Simply put, what happens is, that Twitter will pull up an image description with an ALT text badge when it is clicked upon. For this to happen, the image should feature the ‘ALT’ badge.

A recent post from the Twitter Accessibility account stated that the ALT badge has been made available globally and most bugs have been fixed. The group is also gathering feedback from particular online spaces and will be building more on the feature in the future.

Step-by-step instructions have been provided globally by Twitter on how to add image captions in a blog post. Once the image is uploaded to a tweet, the user needs to add a caption below the image in a text box. There is a 1,000-character ceiling on the image caption.

Once done, you hit save, and the ALT badge appears on the left bottom corner of the image when posted. Clicking on this ‘ALT’ badge will enable the user to see the description as a screen pop-up.

If an external website has embedded one of your tweets on their site, even if you delete that tweet from Twitter, it will still be visible on the external website. Now, with this change in the javascript, the deleted tweet will show up as a blank white box on the external website.

Before Twitter rolled out this ALT badge, users had access only to alt text descriptions for images if they were using screen readers. Though Twitter introduced image descriptions in 2016, they were difficult to add. The company created a dedicated accessibility team in 2020 and has been working on improving accessibility features on the platform since then.