• The browser has launched a campaign created by VMLY&R in which well-known characters participate
  • Only 0.01% of the images published on the platform include this text, which is so important for the blind

The alternative text , or “alt text”, is the text that accompanies the images published on the Internet and read aloud by screen readers, so that visually impaired Internet users can know what is reproduced in them.
This tool, however, is only used in 0.01% of the images posted on Twitter and very few of the top fifty accounts on the platform have ever used it. 

These data are what have prompted the Microsoft Edge browser to launch a campaign in the United States to promote the use of alternative text. The campaign is spread on Twitter with the title of “Alt text adds more” (“Alt text adds more”) and the creative is from VMLY&R. It should be remembered that Edge has a function to create alternative texts.

The campaign has the collaboration of creators, influencers and artists, some of them with visual disparity, such as the lawyer Haben Girma or the digital creator Molly Burke, who will spread promotional messages on Twitter for the use of alternative text. 

They will do it, according to Adweek magazine , through tweets that will not provide any type of context to the images that accompany them , so that users will have to click on the new ALT button on the platform to access the description of the image and additional content.  

Other data that Microsoft has provided on the occasion of the campaign is that there are some 2,200 million people in the world who suffer from some type of vision problem and that 75.6% of people who use screen readers depend exclusively on the audio information to navigate. 

The campaign also aims to encourage Twitter users to retweet Twitter tutors’ messages and to use alt text themselves when posting images.

 

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