Alt Text is (Maybe) Enabled on Threads
Devon Dundee, on Threads last week:
Alt text for images is now available in Threads! A great step in making the app more accessible.
Just press the Alt button after selecting an image to upload. The prompt says, “Add a short description for screen readers. If you leave this blank, we’ll automatically add a description for you.”
Interested to see what that automatic descriptions look like.
I’m likewise intensely curious about how this will work. It’s precisely the use case I’ve thought would be perfectly suited for LLMs to tackle. Better yet would be if the automatic descriptions were easy to manually edit. Sometimes it’s just hard to get started!
It’s the sort of feature that I’d love to test and use, but I haven’t yet found that ‘Alt’ button, nor any other way to adding descriptions natively. Once I do, though, I’m going to have to figure out a way to see or hear the descriptions that the app adds on its own. Some are going to be wild, I’m sure.