Twitter is now more accessible for the visually impaired

Twitter is now more accessible to the visually impaired, introducing descriptions to images with screen readers and braille displays.

Twitter announced the new feature Tuesday, which will be available on the Twitter app for iOS and Android. This isn’t an automatic update -- users can enable image descriptions in Twitter’s accessibility settings.

If you enable this setting, every time you add an image to a tweet, you’ll have the option to add a description with up to 420 characters.

you’ll have the option to add a description with up to 420 characters

Screen readers and other tools help make the Internet more accessible to people who are visually impaired, but they can not "read" images. Image captions and alternate text for images help, but until now there was nothing like that on Twitter.

The questionable aspect of this update is that Twitter makes you go through your accessibility settings to turn this on, a step that will undoubtedly turn off many users out of lack of convenience. Perhaps a better update would just automatically update everyone's Twitter apps to show the image description button without needing to enable it.

This is a step in the right direction though, and hopefully other platforms will follow suit to make the Internet more accessible to those with visual impairments.

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