I love Twitter, and I tolerate Facebook. When I began The Freeman Foundation I believed that having an active social media presence was a vital aspect of the success of the foundation. I wanted to use Twitter and Facebook to assist in advancing our mission. These social media platforms allow me to give people a glimpse into the life of a visually impaired person. By sharing my frustrations, successes, and daily events, I can help people understand that a disabled person can live a normal life. The two hash tags #BlindManProblems and #BlindManPic provide a humorous avenue for me to accomplish this goal.
One frustration I face when using social media is the amount of pictures posted. When an individual would tag me in a picture, I would have no idea what it was. Well, this problem is beginning to change. Recently both Twitter and Facebook have announced their own ways of solving this problem. Facebook has developed a technology that attempts to tell the visually impaired user what is in the picture. Now when I am using voiceover on my phone and come across a picture voiceover says “image could contain,” and then says what is possibly in the picture. While this technology is not perfect, it does provide some context for what is on the screen. You can read more about this technology and the blind engineer who developed it here.
Twitter on the other hand is introducing an option called “alt text.” With this feature, users will be prompted to add text to their pictures which will enable visually impaired people to know what the image is. The problem with this feature is that it is not on automatically. Twitter users will have to go in to their settings and turn it on before they can use it. I would think that having an option to toggle it on or off on the compose a tweet page would be more helpful. To read more about the Twitter alt text, click here.