Alt or not

Eyal Herlin

2021-04-19

Simple and well done. Thanks!

Philip Kiff

2021-02-20

Great little extension for Twitter that reveals alternative text in images at a glance and lets folks quickly know if an image has none.

I try not to retweet Twitter posts without alternative text, and this makes it easy for me to check. And unfortunately, even now in early 2021, that means that I can't retweet very many tweets since the vast majority of tweets still don't include even rudimentary, basic alternative text, let alone well-written and carefully considered alt text.

Twitter itself really should provide an easy way of uncovering this hidden information without requiring a browser extension to do so. They already sometimes (seemingly at random) have indicators that show if some images have alternative text or not with a little ALT icon. I tried to produce something like this using just CSS user style edits and quickly discovered that Twitter's method of coding their pages made it too much of a challenge. And the prospect of a minor change in Twitter's HTML breaking everything made it even more daunting to me.

There are a couple other currently available methods of generating this info, such as bookmarklets or special accessibility toolbar features, that will help users locate and identify alternative text (or more usually for Twitter, *missing* alternative text), but this is a nice, simple, elegant solution that doesn't require any reloading or refreshing.

One day in the future, I look forward to this being available as a cross-platform web extension so that I can use it in other browsers. And I might also like to see a toggle switch that gives users the option of hiding the alternative text by default and just showing just an icon that would then be hoverable/clickable in order to display the alternative text. But in the meantime, this is excellent, as is.

Yi Shun Lai

2022-12-05

Such a great extension. Reminds me to write alt text, which helps me to improve my own alt text and tweets, too!