5
4
85
3
It’s often difficult or cumbersome to tell if images have alternative text on Twitter. Alternative (or alt) text is used to describe images for those who can’t see the image, making them more accessible.
This extension shows which images are missing alternative text, and displays the alt text below the images when available.
Note: on TweetDeck descriptions are not displayed in the notifications column or on GIFs.
Very helpful, and unobtrusive. It’s great seeing what other folks are writing for their Alt Text, as it helps me learn to improve mine! 🙂
Great little extension for Twitter that reveals alternative text in images at a glance and lets folks quickly know if an image has none.
I try not to retweet Twitter posts without alternative text, and this makes it easy for me to check. And unfortunately, even now in early 2021, that means that I can’t retweet very many tweets since the vast majority of tweets still don’t include even rudimentary, basic alternative text, let alone well-written and carefully considered alt text.
Twitter itself really should provide an easy way of uncovering this hidden information without requiring a browser extension to do so. They already sometimes (seemingly at random) have indicators that show if some images have alternative text or not with a little ALT icon. I tried to produce something like this using just CSS user style edits and quickly discovered that Twitter’s method of coding their pages made it too much of a challenge. And the prospect of a minor change in Twitter’s HTML breaking everything made it even more daunting to me.
There are a couple other currently available methods of generating this info, such as bookmarklets or special accessibility toolbar features, that will help users locate and identify alternative text (or more usually for Twitter, *missing* alternative text), but this is a nice, simple, elegant solution that doesn’t require any reloading or refreshing.
One day in the future, I look forward to this being available as a cross-platform web extension so that I can use it in other browsers. And I might also like to see a toggle switch that gives users the option of hiding the alternative text by default and just showing just an icon that would then be hoverable/clickable in order to display the alternative text. But in the meantime, this is excellent, as is.
This is a very clear and distinctive little indication that an image lacks alt text. It’ll be a good way to know and remind others to include it.