I talked about this a little in my previous post on alt text, but it likely got lost at the end. So I thought I'd make a separate post!
When it comes to accessibility, sometimes there are conflicting access needs β some people are allergic to dogs, but others have service dogs, for example. Or some people need bright lighting to help them navigate a space, while others may need dimmer lights due to sensory overload.
Some people can't write alt text because of their disability. I've seen several things that people do on social media to help with this. The main one is the creation of a tag which people can add to a post with images they can't write alt text for. Cohost has an amazing upside compared to Twitter β posts without alt text can be edited to add it. So off the top of my head, perhaps it could work like this:
- People who are willing to help follow the tag #alt text request (this tag already exists!).
- Someone who isn't able to write alt text posts something with the tag.
- Someone claims the post by commenting, then writes alt text and makes a second comment with the alt text.
- The poster edits their post to add alt text, and removes the tag.
This is potentially helpful for folks with cognitive disabilities, fatigue, low vision, or some other disability that makes writing alt text difficult. Step 4 could be optional if it's not possible for the original poster, but I included it because it makes the alt text usable on the main post feed. Otherwise you run into the same issues as Twitter, where you have to navigate to the comments to see if someone has written something.
Just a thought! What do folks think?
EDIT: @ant makes the good point that this will usually only work for the first post in a thread. If someone writes a reply and adds the tag (but the first post didn't have the tag), it won't show up in the feed for the tag. Check out the comments for more discussion about this!
