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‘May be an image’: What it’s like browsing Instagram while blind

• Kait Sanchez writes about the experience of screen reader users on social media. The auto generated alt text for photos on Instagram and other sites is often poor: “two brown cats lying on a textured surface” turned out to be a woman in a wedding dress.
• Kait says that technology can’t replace the human element; a computer is never going to know you posted an image of your dog because of its hilarious quizzical expression, rather than because he is a black-and-white pitbull mix.
• Alt text hasn’t always been possible to write on social media platforms, who often play catch-up to improve their accessibility only once they gain popularity. There’s an assumption that blind people aren’t interested in visual media. But as Kait points out, culture is moulded on social networks, and it’s not fair for people to miss out on a shared social language.
• It’s easy to blame the social media users for not providing alt text, or the tech platforms for not educating them. However, content such as memes – rapidly evolving iterations of undescribed images with tiny words in weird fonts – are particularly hard to write alt text for:
  • “The funniest images rely on comedic timing through careful visual composition, prior knowledge of a specific meme, or familiarity with several different cultural references.”
  • “Writing an image description for an esoteric meme can feel like explaining internet culture to your grandparents: you suddenly don’t know how to describe what exactly made you laugh.”
• We can educate against the simpler problems though. Kent Dodds demonstrates why special characters and emojis in usernames provide a terrible experience for some social media users. “A screen reader isn’t technically incorrect if it reads a character as “mathematical bold capital,” but most sighted people will read it simply as a letter with different formatting.”

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