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Using a screen reader to browse Instagram, as some visually impaired people do, is a strange patchwork of sounds. It can be overwhelming, especially if you’re used to quickly scanning information with your eyes, hearing a synthetic voice awkwardly churning out usernames, timestamps and similar accounts as if they were all as important as the actual content of the message. Among all of that hearing stimulation, if someone added alt text to their photo, you might hear something like, “John and I are holding our ankles in the water at the beach.” John makes a pained face as I hand a dead crab threateningly and laugh.
Image descriptions used by screen readers need to be added by users, and like many accessibility features in social media, these fields are regularly overlooked. In these cases, the voice will sometimes recite alt text automatically generated by Instagram or the user’s device. The result, Danielle McCann, the National Federation of the Blind’s social media coordinator, tells me, can be quite funny. Descriptions that have evolved from years of machine learning still often misidentify what is happening in photos.
Recently, she was scrolling through Instagram when her screen reader said there was a photo of “two brown cats lying on a textured surface.” Her husband informed her that it was actually a bridal shop ad featuring a woman in a wedding dress. “Thank goodness I was not [commenting] like, “Oh, these cats are cute,” you know? “
These types of algorithmic misinterpretations are quite common. Here is a sample of the descriptions I heard while browsing Instagram with VoiceOver on my phone: “red polo shirt, apple, unicorn” (a photo of a t-shirt with a design of a sofa on it), ” can be an indoor picture “(a picture of a cat next to a houseplant),” can be a food picture “(a picture of seashells),” can be a cartoon “(almost all illustrations or comic strips), and a lot of “may be a picture of a person” (a variety of photos depicting one or more people).
As devices have acquired accessibility settings such as magnification, high contrast, and built-in screen readers, social media has also gradually become more accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired: many sites and apps respond to Users device settings, have options to switch between light and dark modes and allow users to compose image descriptions. But the existence of these features does not guarantee that people with disabilities will not be excluded online. Accessibility of social media is a group effort. People need to know the features, understand what they are, and remember to use them. A platform can have a hundred accessibility options, but without each user’s buy-in, people are always left out.
Even when people use alt text, they often don’t fully think through what’s important to convey to someone who can’t see the photos. Some people will write overly simplistic descriptions like “red flower” or “blonde girl looking up at the sky,” without really describing why the images are worth sharing. At the other end of the spectrum, multiple paragraphs of text to describe an image can be boring to navigate with a screen reader. McCann tells his friends to think of alt text as a writing exercise: “How do you provide so much information in as few words as possible?” “
“The general rule of thumb is to be informative, not poetic,” says the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). “But on social media, feel free to add some personality – you’re probably sharing this photo of your dog because he has a hilarious interrogative expression, for example, not because he’s a mix of black pitbull and White.”
While automated image descriptions can potentially improve beyond the level of confusion between a woman in a wedding dress and some cats, they cannot replace the human element. Facebook had an image crash in 2019 that showed all of its users the photo tags which are usually hidden, displaying machine-assigned descriptors like “Image may contain: people standing”. Are the people in this image kissing and making awkward faces? Are they standing in front of a breathtaking view? Social media can seem a lot less social if your access to the content shared there is based on conservative interpretations of computers.
Advocates stress that accessibility should always be considered from the start, “not as an addition to an already existing platform long after the fact,” AFB says. But the most popular platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, didn’t go this route during initial development, and instead are constantly catching up to improve accessibility. When these enhancements are deployed, there is never any guarantee that people will use them consistently.
One of the biggest hurdles is the assumption that blind people simply won’t be interested in visual media. “Just because they’re visual doesn’t mean they’re not immediately appealing to people who are blind or visually impaired,” says McCann. “I think that’s a big misconception: ‘Oh, well, they don’t care about the pictures.’ But we do. When culture is molded on social media, it sucks to lose a shared social language because you can’t see the images everyone is talking about.
Christy Smith Berman, low vision editor at Can I Play That, responded to a tweet from TT Games that announced the delay of Star Wars Lego with text on an image. When she replied with a alternative text requestSmith Berman has received responses from people expressing disbelief that blind people would even be on Twitter to begin with, let alone video games.
These false assumptions often mean that people are excluded from entertaining cultural moments on social media. Memes usually involve fast moving iterations of undescribed images with lowercase words in weird fonts. Viral videos are reposted and shared without any kind of description, via audio or text, of what is happening on screen. “Oh, that must be someone dancing,” McCann thinks when she encounters a TikTok with no audio other than music. “Well, no, it’s actually someone making a cheesesteak. But I didn’t know it because there is no audio indication.
“A lot of memes that people share, they don’t add alt text to them,” says Steven Aquino, a legally blind journalist. Aquino doesn’t use a screen reader, instead relies on magnification, but he still wonders what goes into memes sometimes. “It’s really hard because I can’t see very well, and I’m just like, ‘Okay, that’s supposed to be funny, but I can’t say it. “
Beyond a simple neglect of accessibility features, conveying visual humor through text is not something everyone has a knack for. The funniest images rely on comedic timing through careful visual composition, prior knowledge of a specific meme, or familiarity with several different cultural references. Writing an image description for an esoteric meme can be like explaining internet culture to your grandparents – you suddenly don’t know how to describe exactly what made you laugh. The complicated nature of memes literacy isn’t something we can blame on platforms – it’s just not something the average person is used to putting into words.
But there are other, less complicated factors that can impact the online experiences of people who are blind or visually impaired. Aquino points out that people will use special Unicode characters in their Twitter display names which are more difficult to read and are not interpreted as letters by screen reader software. A screen reader is not technically incorrect if it reads a character as a “mathematical bold capital”, but most sighted people will simply read it as a letter with different formatting.
“For people who use screen readers, this software is only so smart,” Aquino explains. “So if you have a smart name, your voiceover or whatever else you use is going to fail. Tweets that include rows of emojis, or lots of special characters to create an image or convey a cursive script, can be hellish to listen to when read by a screen reader. Posting a screenshot of the tweet with alt text is a viable alternative, but people rarely know how to do it.
McCann is happy that many sites have improved their accessibility options over the years, but she wishes they were used more widely and wonders why they aren’t better promoted. TikTok has text-to-speech and alerts people when flickering effects in their videos can trigger seizures, so why can’t all social sites have better prompts to encourage users to add captions, visual descriptions, and text. alternative text?
“It is up to the disability community to educate,” she says. “Why isn’t there more education from these traditional businesses? “
McCann wishes it would be easier for her to join in the fun when things like TikTok videos go viral. “Unless someone sits down with me and explains to me what’s going on, I really feel like I can’t discuss this with someone,” she says. “It’s exclusive to a point, because I love jokes. I love pasta recipes. I want to know that stuff! I’m still part of the social fabric.
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