Is there an accessibility reason why Twitter makes it so difficult to read the contents of alt text outside of a screen reader context? Or is it just to keep people from using it as spillover characters?
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If Twitter made the entered alt text visible on mouse-over, you'd get a lot more “legitimate” usage and some more efforts to game it, but that trade seems very worthwhile to me
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It's the title attribute that's visible on hover in most browsers, not alt text. It tends to be used to add supplementary information which is an accessibility issue. The hover action isn't universally available and isn't very discoverable. They could set title to the alt text.
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that would be how I would implement it, naively. Unless it's bad for the alt text to be duplicated, for a reason I don't know! I agree that the hover action isn't how you'd show it if you wanted it to be very discoverable, but it would at least be available
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The issue would be that the alt text is meant to describe the content of the image for visually impaired users, and it wouldn't be great if they started a trend of using it as a gimmick to insert hidden jokes, etc. Not sure if it would be a good or bad thing to do that with it.
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