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Comment by jsjddbbwj | Hacker News Reader

Thank you, very valuable comment.

Yes, it is. Not everyone can see well enough to read text in images. For those who have that difficulty, describing the content of an image enables enjoyment of a joke that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Many people may not be aware that Twitter allows you to put alt text on an image so people using assistive technologies can get a description of the image. I encourage people to use this feature.

It's too bad their implementation of the feature is so poor [1], requiring it to be first enabled via accessibility settings [2] that most Twitter users probably never look at.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pubs/pdfs/2019/twitter-alt-t...)

[2] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/picture-descriptio...

Meanwhile, Mastodon has it right in front with OCR built in. Someone often comes along to reply with a description if you don't/aren't able to do one.

Yep. I was going to take a potshot at Twitter about how they must be feeling some competitive pressure from Mastodon if they need to rip off features, but it looks like Twitter has actually had this feature since some time in 2016, and I'm not sure when Mastodon added it.

Either way, anything that makes Twitter a little less awful is nice to see.

> but it looks like Twitter has actually had this feature since some time in 2016, and I'm not sure when Mastodon added it.

Mastodon started in 2016, so it was a bit early. It added this feature in 2017: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/commit/4ec1771165ab8dd...

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