This article is two years old but still relevant to social media in 2023.

One of the biggest barriers is the assumption that blind people just won’t be interested in visual media. “Just because they’re visual doesn’t mean that they’re immediately not attractive to people who are blind or low vision,” says McCann. “I think that’s one big misconception: ‘Oh, well, they don’t care about pictures.’ But we do.” When culture is molded on social networks, it sucks to lose out on a shared social language because you can’t see the images everyone is talking about.

Christy Smith Berman, a low vision editor at Can I Play That, responded to a TT Games tweet that announced the delay of Star Wars Lego with text on an image. When she replied with a request for alt text, Smith Berman was met with responses from people expressing disbelief that blind people would even be on Twitter to begin with, let alone care about video games.

  • dankeck@beehaw.orgOP
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    1 year ago

    I just went to https://cohost.org/vogon with the screen reader NVDA and tried to browse the graphics of electronics there.

    Good news: the web page is coded correctly, and I heard alt text for the images as expected. Kudos to cohost, and also thanks to you for working to include as many people as possible.