The image uses Twitter’s “alt text” feature to disguise a joke or punchline. A trend that does not amuse people with visual impairments.
It’s an image that has been on a loop for several days on Twitter: a white rectangle accompanied by a black arrow pointing at the bottom left of the image and a message “Click here”. The user is then invited to click on the “ALT” button, positioned at the bottom of each image published on the social network, usually revealing a joke.
Brands, personalities or anonymous have been lending themselves for several days to the game of hidden messages. A trend that does not please blind or visually impaired people.
Accessibility issue
Because basically, the “ALT” function allows, when publishing an image on Twitter, to fill in a precise description of the image. The aim is to make the image more accessible for blind people, so that they can understand the nature of the photo using their “screen readers”. This assistance software is used on smartphones to help with accessibility, in particular by making it possible to read via a voice synthesis what is displayed on the screen.
Many Internet users have thus expressed their dissatisfaction with this trend, which they consider “inappropriate”. Some even revealed the consequences of this bad joke: nearly thirty seconds of uninterrupted noise to transcribe the joke of the “Tweets of cats” account which had indicated 200 “MEOW” as a description of its image.
Note that the alternative descriptions of images on Twitter can contain up to 1000 characters, enough to be able to create complete and really useful captions for people with visual impairments.
