Text alternative and order
Another microblog post caught my eye this morning, which entirely consists of a screengrab of a different post by a different author on a different social platform — with no alt text:
New Parent Idea:
- Take pictures of you pulling baby out of spacecraft in forest
- Hide pictures in attic for kid to find when he's 10.
I won't link to it because it's not for me to police the way people use social media, or a11y-shame them or anything. But it's a pity that an intrinsically accessible text-based post ends up being circulated in this form.
Thinking about it as I write, I suppose this is a sort of unoffical attempt at re-tweeting something across the boundaries of unfederated social media. A user wants to pass on something they like along with the proper attribution, context etc. Posting a screengrab is an easy way to boost a joke in a way that seems honourable.
Conclusions
Whatever deep and meaningful thoughts I was hoping to pull out of my brain about this have evaporated at this point!
Probably the only shred of interest I can salvage from this is the thought that the content of the post is best served by representing it in order of visual hierarchy rather than the order it appears on the screen; the joke is the important thing, the attribution and context is secondary.
END