Twitter had conducted a Twitter Flight developer conference last year where CEO Jack Dorsey was requesting for more ideas and updates to their service. The requested feature would be able to offer more flexibility in adding more alternative text to the images to make it easily accessible to the visually impaired people. The company has now made this request into action that was implemented from yesterday. People who are using the Android as well as iOS version device can get access to the add descriptions that will be about 420 characters within the Tweets. By adding the new text descriptions, it will help the twitter users to view the tweets for those who are still not able to view it.
The twitter already has the automated screen readers and the Braille devices that can easily translate only the text and not the images that had been a big issue for the visually impaired people who access the twitters content. By adding the text captions most of the devices will be able to work along with tweets and give more comprehensive on-platform experience. The new addition has been already become popular among some of the news giants such as The BBC, The New York Times, etc as they have started using this option to connect easily with the people. The company has web-standard alt-text data coding that will included in later stages as they have been planning to update REST API and Twitter Cards services that can provide new option for the people and developers.
The web-standard alt-text data coding from Twitter is very much interesting which can introduce new data source that can be accessed widely and reach more than just the visually impaired. The same type of coding is also used by the Google to match the right content to the user requests. The new description text can provide new data for that can be included in the tweets with 420 characters taking it beyond the normal 140-characters. The latest data tool can become a very interesting tool if more people start using text descriptions along with the tweet images. It will also make easy for searchers who want to look for tweets with the image content and receive the data based on images that are popular.
Those who are planning to improve their business can also be benefitted with this new update from Twitter. Businesses can get alerts from this tool when someone uses images of the company’s products, logos and more. The most important advantage about this new alt text image description is that it will help the search engines in finding a particular tweet. By adding this new tool, search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo will be able to look into the image content. The same method will be applicable when you search within the search field available in Twitter. Apart from these simple uses, this new tool can go beyond our imagination if it gets more attention from the publishers.