Wow, Twitter just rolled out clickable ALT label on other people's images!
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It was never useless. It always set the alt text of the image. It makes it available to blind users via screen readers.
Alt text is used across the web. Browsers don't make it available to users who aren't using screen reader software. Twitter is choosing to do that themselves.
Alt text is great. Twitter's implementation, in my experience, has... left a lot to be desired, let's say.
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It worked fine beyond not letting people know the feature existed and encouraging them to use it. Surfacing it to users without screen readers encourages using it. It may not be used as intended to provide a substitute for the visual content of the image though.
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