Alt text for images is, sometimes, an underappreciated feature on the internet. A lot of people focus on the pixels that they see, but they don’t focus on the history behind the image. Alt text gives pictures a text description and lets people understand more of what’s going on in the image. However, anyone who works with SEO will definitely know why image alt text is important.
Twitter is adding two new features to its image alt text
Right now, you have the ability to add text descriptions to your images via the alt text feature on Twitter. It’s not something that too many people use, but it’s still a useful feature. In a new tweet, Twitter lets us in on some news. Twitter is adding some new features to its image alt text. The first feature is the alt text badge. When an image has alt text added, a new badge will appear on the image. The badge will be a simple rounded rectangle with the letters ALT in it. When you click on the image, the second feature comes into play. It’s called Exposed Images Descriptions. As the name suggests, this will display the alt text in a small popup window. It will let people read through the description.
This is being tested right now
If you want to see these new features in the wild, there’s a 97% chance that you’ll be disappointed. Right now, Twitter is testing these new alt text features on 3% of its users. It seems like the users were selected at random, but it’s a really limited pool of people. The company is testing these features on iOS, Android, and on the browser. There’s no telling when this feature will go live for everyone, but Twitter did say that it’s testing these out for a month. Hopefully, we’ll see this feature launch soon after that.
