The “tl;dr” (“too long; didn’t read”): if you just want to know how to make text art accessible, just scroll down to the heading “How to make text art accessible”. If you want to know how to check for image descriptions on twitter, scroll down to heading “How to use image descriptions on Twitter”. But if you want to understand why this matters to me, read on!

I haven’t posted (here) a lot of the details but a few months ago I finally had to learn to really use the screen reader (VoiceOver) on my phone (iPhone). That’s because my vision, which has since been partly corrected with surgery in one eye, had gotten so bad that I couldn’t really read anything on my phone reliably, even when zoomed a lot. I’d been previously using it more for comfort and convenience to read, for example, a long article.

I also spend a lot of time on twitter and while I had previously learned that it was painful how often images of largely textual or graphical data get shared that I just couldn’t read, thus missing part of the point someone might be making, I hadn’t had to deal with the incredibly annoyance of text art with a screen reader. A recent text art meme you may have seen:

Continue reading “How to share text art (and images) more accessibly (on twitter, mostly)” →