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Another death knell for accessibility on Twitter
A case study of how Twitter’s proposed API changes will further undermine accessibility for its users
Some time ago, Portland-based developer Hannah Kolbeck noticed a gap in the accessibility of images posted to Twitter. Specifically, when users posted images without alt-text in them, people using screen readers to review tweets couldn’t review the content of those images. As a result, she created a remarkably helpful bot. “Alt-text reminder” reminded you to add alt-text to your tweets immediately after you posted them whenever you forgot. In early 2021, Hannah added another bot. Twitter users could summon “@AltTextUtil” to scan images for text using optical character recognition (OCR) and then post the extracted text in follow-up tweets. Unlike other bots at the time, Hannah’s included the original image in the responses as well, so the image could be effectively retweeted along with the alt-text.
“Alt-text reminder” did its job for about two years before Twitter incorporated similar functionality. Anil Dash noted at the time that the debut of Twitter’s feature lacked acknowledgment of Hannah and others, who had “built great tools like @AltTxtReminder that have been helping with accessibility on the platform for years.”
Of course, that feature debuted before Elon Musk took over the platform. Upon his arrival Musk dismantled (e.g. fired) the accessibility team at Twitter. Hannah told me that this action effectively ended any tentative plans Twitter had in their roadmap then to incorporate the features her second bot provided — the ability to pull text from images upon demand.
As a result, @AltTextUtil became even more valuable to its users — people who wished to add helpful alt-text to their tweets (or other people’s tweets) and people who depended on the bot to have…
