I came across an interesting tweet on Twitter yesterday by a user who is visually impaired called Rob Long. He recently reached out on the popular social media platform asking users to change their accessibility settings to help blind and visually impaired users gain a full Twitter experience.
He explains that by changing your settings this will help visually impaired users ‘see’ the images that you post with your Twitter content. The simple change means that any images used will be described to the user, letting them enjoy the full experience of the information you are sharing on social media. Rob Long explains below how quick and easy it is to change your accessibility settings on Twitter and I encourage everybody to go ahead and do this.
I’m a blind twitter user. There are a lot of us out there. Increase your ability to reach us and help us interact with your pictures, it’s really simple and makes a huge difference to our twitter experiance allowing us to see your images our way. Thanks for the description 😎 pic.twitter.com/hCsjoFdmev— Rob Long (@_Red_Long) 3 January 2018
Changing your accessibility settings on Twitter really is simple. All that you need to do is:
- Go into Settings and Accessibility (either on the app or the main web page of your account)
- Select Accessibility
- Turn on Compose Image Descriptions.
When I came across this tweet it made me think for a second and made me realise how lucky we are to be able to use a social media platform like Twitter with no restrictions. I definitely wasn’t aware that such a small accessibility change could make a huge difference to a sector of users on Twitter. In fact I hadn’t given it a second thought until I came across this tweet.
It just goes to show how powerful social media can be and that technology is growing and changing rapidly in the right direction.
