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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right, exactly. I guess my untested thesis is that you'd get more good use out of it than bad, but then (a) maybe that's wrong, which might even have been tested, or (b) maybe it's significantly better to have blank alt text than joke-y alt text
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Daniel’s correct as to base reasons, and as to your thesis being untested it HAS been tested, historically. Browsers used to expose alt text in exactly this way, and stopped doing because because people did abuse it to insert “secret” jokes rather than describe the image.
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I think Twitter should require setting a description. Many people might set it to nonsense, but it'd end up helping visually impaired users quite a bit. The intention of the standard is that every image has proper alt text included unless it's a decorative part of the site theme.
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Surfacing it via the title tag might help encourage people to set it, since otherwise they can't tell that it does anything. I think it'd probably help more than it'd hurt. They need a simpler explanation of the purpose instead of the current wall of text people won't read.
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