While it is not groundbreaking, but still a well-intended feature that requires a small amount of community effort, Twitter is introducing a way to make itself more accessible to the visually impaired. In essence, it is not a feature that will work regardless of circumstances and what device an individual uses, but at least in the case of screen readers and braille displays, Twitter makes it easier. The way that is achievable is through a feature that allows all users to post images along with a description of up to 420 characters.

While the text-only tweets are not an issue that can’t be handled by screen readers, for example, the photos you post are. The new feature allows anyone who posts a photo to Twitter to add the brief description that will make it more accessible to the visually impaired. However, although it’s being pushed to both iOS and Android devices, it is not a feature that will turn on automatically. If you wish to enable it, you can do so through Twitter’s accessibility settings.

While many other social platforms and different parts of the internet already have means of making themselves accessible to visually impaired individuals, provided they have access to specialized tools, Twitter had not yet done plenty in that direction.

Following Twitter’s studies on the matter of post reach and post engagement and their statistics which suggest that tweets that contain photos result in 313% higher engagement from the public, the company decided to truly attempt to include the entirety of its users in its count. As long as the users of Twitter add an image description along with their photos, any visually impaired person will be able to make use of assistive technology in order to understand what the picture is about, even if they cannot see it.

According to some reports, this new feature can easily turn into something that can expand its own utility, being ground for more complex things such as Twitter search or identifying specific tweets.

Some individuals, however, frown upon the way the feature is made available and believe that plenty of people with either miss it while others will not recur to using it out of comfort – considering it has to be turned on manually. Of course, if someone knows a person with a visual disability, they will be more likely to remember to turn it on whereas other content creators may not.

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