If you’re new to BlueSky and/or unfamiliar with the culture around image and art posts, you may also be unfamiliar with what alt text is, what it means, and how it’s used. Although it’s a very underused feature, users can add it to any image posts they make. Essentially, alt text comprises a description of the posted image that becomes available to screen readers to be read aloud for people who are blind or who have low vision. It’s also available for people to read if they see the image but can’t process it for whatever reason, or if they simply need extra context for what they’re seeing.
So: how does one actually add this text to an image? Well, when an image is posted, you can see a small overlay at the top left that’s labeled “+ALT.” Click/press/tap there and a dialogue will magically appear, asking for up to 2000 characters of descriptive text to be appended to the image. Once the image is posted a similar overlay will appear at the bottom right of the posted image. Click/press/tap there, and you’ll be able to read any text that’s been appended to the image in this manner. And hey…don’t forget to add transcriptions to all-text screen caps as well. They’re not always recognized and read by screen readers.
Including alt text on posted images is a Good Thing. But it turns out that it’s not always a simple thing sometimes for folks to “just write the fuckin’ text.” Dyslexia, dysgraphia, visual processing disorders; not to mention physical conditions such as arthritis, etc., can make it VERY difficult for some people to add it to an image sometimes. What’s more, on a long enough time scale, EVERYONE will find that certain skills or abilities can easily degrade or fluctuate.
So, if you are in a position to be able to add this alt text to your images, fantastic. You can even toggle a setting (Settings > Accessibility > Require alt text before posting) that makes it mandatory for any posted image to have something in that field before it’s eligible to be published.
But if people can’t write it themselves, then they can simply add the keyword “Alt4Me” to their post or to the alt text field in their posted image to summon human volunteers for help. If you’re inclined to volunteer to provide this kind of help to other BlueSky users, the most effective way to see where this tag used is to follow the Alt4Me feed, which collects all these requests and displays them in chronological order from newest to oldest. The feed will find variations of the keyword in posts and in the alt text field of posted images. It’s been built to be deliberately very greedy in terms of what it matches. It doesn’t care about hashtags, spaces, or case sensitivity. Here’s what that looks like.
#alt4me = alt4me = alt for me = ALT4ME
All of those and more will be included in the feed. What’s important to note is that the feed can get “noisy,” because people will also use the keyword when they’re talking about the service or when they’re trying to raise awareness about it. Good news here: you can (AND SHOULD) choose to EXCLUDE a post from being collected by the feed by using other keywords. These words do not care about hashtags or case sensitivity, but they DO care about spaces. Examples as follows.
nofeed = noaltfeed = noaltplz = /alt4me
Other things I’ve heard and seen here and there…
- Do images with alt text get shared more widely or get more interaction? I guess maybe they do, but not in a way that’s particularly noticeable or consistent (as far as I can tell). There are plenty of folks who won’t like, share, or otherwise engage with posted images without it. There are people who mute or block accounts that consistently fail to use it. On the other hand there are many accounts that never use it who still manage to get plenty of engagement to the tune of hundreds or thousands of likes and shares.
- Is it true that the alt text that gets added to images is primarily used to train LLMs? Well no, it’s not meant for that at all. It was introduced as an accessibility tool more than thirty years ago. THAT’S what it’s for. It’s also helpful as a placeholder for whenever an image fails to load for any reason or as a way do provide context for those of us who may not be as culturally literate as others–we can’t always be experts about everything. Anything written in that field gets indexed for searches as well, which means that the content and keywords that appear there are subject to your muted words/tags settings and can be detected and used by feeds as well.
I hope that people can find something helpful from this. BlueSky has been around long enough and there’s been enough talk about this subject that there’s not much here that should be much of a surprise. But here we are again anyway.
Thanks, y’all. Have fun. Happy BlueSky-ing.