It’s been a while since the letters ‘ALT’ appear at the bottom when viewing images in our Twitter TL. Many users have overlooked this detail, but it is a tool that allows us to enter a description in our photos, providing extra information to our followers – and with a much higher character limit than a normal tweet. In this article you will see step by step how to add alternative text in Twitter photos .
The process is quite simple and it is only one more step when it comes to publishing our images on this social network. When opening the application, we click on the ‘+’ button with which we can choose what type of tweet we want to publish, and select ‘Photos’ to choose the one from our album that we like the most (or one that we want to do at that moment).
Once the photo that interests us is selected , at the bottom of it we will see the ‘+ALT’ button, click on it and we can include a text of up to 1,000 characters to add a description of what we are photographing. Once said descriptive text has been written, all you have to do is click on ‘Done’ and the image will be ready to be published with its alternative text incorporated.
WHAT IS TWITTER PHOTO ALT TEXT
Doubts about what the alternative text of Twitter photos is are quickly dissipated as soon as this tool recently implemented in the social network is used. Alternative text allows you to describe what is in a photo to provide more information to the follower who stops to see it.
Although Twitter abounds with memes that do not have any type of description, this tool is very useful and seeks to make the little blue bird one of the most inclusive social networks for all users.
WHAT ARE PHOTO DESCRIPTIONS ON TWITTER FOR?
Although it is a function that has gone unnoticed by the vast majority, the reason that explains why photo descriptions are used on Twitter is not trivial. The main objective of the descriptions on this platform is to help blind or visually impaired people who use assistive technology. In this way, they will be able to appreciate in greater detail what the image contains when clicking on the ‘ALT’ badge of each image.
In addition, alternative texts are also very useful for photography professionals , which can include information such as the type of camera used to take the photo. Alt texts can also have journalistic use, serving as captions in print newspapers, with the added bonus of their surprisingly long 1,000 character length .
When it comes to adding alt text (something you can do even when uploading more than one photo in a tweet), there are several things to keep in mind. The idea is to add the important information , since on many occasions the images and GIFs that are published do not have a description or only have the name of the file. With a good description, your followers will be able to understand why you decided on that image and not another.
Twitter also invites brevity in the descriptions , even if the text limit is exaggerated . This is because some screen readers used by people who are blind or have low vision could only read text that was between 200 and 250 characters long. Fortunately, most current screen readers do not have such a limit, but just in case it is always better to bet on being concise.
Finally, to better adapt to these screen readers, it is convenient not to abuse abbreviations and write the full word (doctor Martínez instead of Dr. Martínez). In the case of acronyms, they must be written in capital letters , since if they are written in lower case the reader can read it as if it were a word, with the consequent loss of context.