While most social media users can see everything, not everyone enjoys the luxury. Many users are visually impaired, making accessibility on social media a concern.
As one of the most popular platform for image and video sharing, Instagram is introducing the ability to add alternative text to photos.
This is an effort by the social media to make its platform friendlier as it becomes more accessible to those visually impaired users.
"With more than 285 million people in the world who have visual impairments, we know there are many people who could benefit from a more accessible Instagram," said Instagram announcing the update.
First, is the automatic alternative text.
What it does, is allowing visually impaired users to hear descriptions of photos through their screen reader when they use Feed, Explore and Profile. This feature uses object recognition AI technology to generate a description of photos for screen readers so users can hear a list of items that photos may contain as they browse Instagram's app.
The second, is the custom alternative text.
While the AI-powered automatic alternative text can recognize things inside images, the custom alternative text allows photo uploaders to add richer description on their photos.
So for example, a photo has some details that the uploader wants to highlight, they can do this using the custom alternative text where they can be more descriptive than when depending on the automatic counterpart.
This way, people using screen readers will be able to hear this description easily.
To use this feature, users can start taking a photo, or uploading existing one during the publishing process, to the choose a filter and edit the image.
Tap on the 'Next' button to then tap on the 'Advanced Settings' at the bottom of the screen. Here they will see the 'Alt Text' option.
Write the alternative text in the box given and tap 'Done'.
They can also do this by going to the photo and tap the three-bot menu icon.
Here they can directly tap the 'Add Alt Text' which is located in the bottom right.
According to a Facebook (who owns Instagram), its accessibility research report in 2016 said that: "people with visual impairments comment and like photos [on Facebook] as often as people who did not [have a visual disability]."
With the fact that the whole world is literally on the internet, social media networks in general should also be friendly to those users with visual disabilities.
Users are expecting to engage with others and brands, and inaccessible content on social media is a barrier to equal communication access for users with visual disabilities.
Social media is a convenient way to access information, provide information and communicate. And Instagram here, is moving in the right direction.