Suggesting text alternatives for images in social media

Abstract

Image description has been a recurrent topic on web accessibility over the years. With the increased use of social networks, this discussion is even more relevant. Social networks are responsible for a considerable part of the images available on the web. In this context, users are not only consuming visual content but also creating it. Due to this shared responsibility of providing accessible content, major platforms must go beyond accessible interfaces. Additional resources must also be available to support users in creating accessible content. Although many of today's services already support accessible media content authoring, current efforts still fail to properly integrate and guide their users through the authoring process. One of the consequences is that many users are still unaware of what an image description is, how to provide it, and why it is necessary. We present SONAAR, a project that aims to improve the accessibility of user-generated content on social networks. Our approach is to support the authoring and consumption of accessible social media content. Our prototypes currently focus on Twitter and Facebook and are available as an Android application and as a Chrome extension.