Disability and Accessibility

906 readers

1 users here now

All things disability and accessibility related, and advocacy for making those things better.

See also this community's sister subs Feminism, LGBTQ+, Neurodivergence, and POC.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

‘May be an image’: what it’s like browsing Instagram while blind (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 years ago by dankeck to c/disability

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This article is two years old but still relevant to social media in 2023.

One of the biggest barriers is the assumption that blind people just won’t be interested in visual media. “Just because they’re visual doesn’t mean that they’re immediately not attractive to people who are blind or low vision,” says McCann. “I think that’s one big misconception: ‘Oh, well, they don’t care about pictures.’ But we do.” When culture is molded on social networks, it sucks to lose out on a shared social language because you can’t see the images everyone is talking about.

Christy Smith Berman, a low vision editor at Can I Play That, responded to a TT Games tweet that announced the delay of Star Wars Lego with text on an image. When she replied with a request for alt text, Smith Berman was met with responses from people expressing disbelief that blind people would even be on Twitter to begin with, let alone care about video games.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] dankeck 3 points 2 years ago

I just went to https://cohost.org/vogon with the screen reader NVDA and tried to browse the graphics of electronics there.

Good news: the web page is coded correctly, and I heard alt text for the images as expected. Kudos to cohost, and also thanks to you for working to include as many people as possible.