Hacker News Reader

Comment by hsbauauvhabzb | Hacker News Reader

Is it ironic that a text image is used by Twitter to bypass character limits on a post? This has to be a usability nightmare for differently abled people.

View on HN

Besides the character limit, there's an embarrassing number of reasons people might share screenshots of tweets:

- to "retweet" without notifying the person and being linked to as a "quote tweet" on the OP

- to share a post in a controversial context where many people are blocked by the tweeter in question (if you're blocked by someone, you can't read their tweets)

- to share a post you expect will be deleted shortly

- to screengrab a couple of posts that make up necessary context and wouldn't make sense if retweeted on their own

To your point about people using screenreaders etc, it seems to me that it would be fairly trivial (cputime aside) to OCR tweets and automatically apply alt-text, but instead they rely on the uploader to enter it manually.

Sure, but not everybody who is vision impaired is fully blind. in some situations they don’t use ocr or alt text, because sane websites can leverage zoom functions. Think: elderly people on iPhones, who may be able to pinch zoom if they’re technical understanding permits it.

There is decent alt text on the image, but I can’t speak to how well Twitter works with a screen reader in order to access it.

Is this done automatically by Twitter? Can the user set their own alt?

Yes, users can set their own alt text for Images.

However the Alt text version is slightly different from the posted one , so not really good substitute.

There's no requirement or inherent value in them being identical. They should provide as much of the same essential information as possible, and in this case they do. It's reasonable for the main image to include more non-essential data or aesthetic flourishes than the alt, which again is the case here.

There are definitely accessibility issues with using images as a text medium, mainly that the poster has to be aware of the accessibility issues and specifically choose to alleviate them. But that was done here.

For an actual image of an object that makes sense, but for image of just text I would expect it to match, there is lot of reading in between the lines , exact words used are important and this is a statement that will influence the stock price.

We are at the stage where business critical market moving press releases are now made on twitter as an image by twitter’s ceo because twitter won’t support longer text, two days after twitter deployed an major update to alt text [1] .

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/07/twitter-alt-text-badge-ima...

Twitter is a lot like HTML in that how it is used is so far removed from how it was designed to be used that barring radical redesigns in the protocol itself, the vast majority of the ways people use it is getting around the inherent limitations of the system.

The alt text has the full contents.

the texts differ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30984388

Differently abled?

Go nitpick somewhere else.

You can say „disabled“ just fine. I have a disability and I never met someone who preferred differently abled.

It‘s not a slur (yet)

Sure I’ll take that on board. I try and live with a ‘don’t be an asshole’ mantra but it’s fairly hard to navigate correctness on terms I don’t frequently use. I would assume that in almost all scenarios, incorrect but good intent probably indicate innocent mistakes.

No offence was intended though (;

Is the term nitpick offensive to nitwits?

Pretty sure the people who use terms like “differently abled”, “LatinX”, “they/them” etc., are the ones forcing their nitpicks on everyone else.

Great alt right bait there mate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com