DEPENDING ON WHAT kind of accounts you follow on Instagram, you might have seen a recent trend appearing in your feed.
Certainly, if you follow activist and fashion icon Sinead Burke, you will have noticed she includes an image description for the image posted below the caption.
Now, if you’re in possession of two working eyes (lucky you), you might be wondering, “what’s the point?” That’s the thing though – not everyone has two perfectly working eyes. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to flex for the ‘gram as much as you though.
Although screen readers and braille technology work efficiently with text posts, images themselves have proven to be an area of difficulty.
Twitter lead the way in 2016 when it introduced image descriptions to help the visually impaired. Using up to 420 characters, people can provide details of the image they are tweeting. The description can then be accessed by the visually impaired and be read like any other text post using their assistive technology.
Sadly, there’s no such feature built into Instagram itself yet, so users have to do it via the caption.
As well as improving accessibility, it also makes it easier for people to find your images, which is common sense if you want to make it as an #influencer.
So, there you go.
