My most productive work time may be between summer and the winter slowdown for the holidays. Getting all sorts of stuff done lately. Here’s a sneak peek video of something shipping tomorrow for folks who post to Micro.blog mostly from the web.

@vincent @manton oh fancy!

@vincent Thanks. Just don’t look directly at the JavaScript. Yikes. 🙂

@manton Yay! That’ll be helpful, thanks.

@Lynessence Oh, good point… Support for uploading multiple photos when posting on the web version of Micro.blog, and new buttons to remove a photo before posting or to set accessibility text. Will have a longer blog post tomorrow!

This looks great, good work! 👏 Have you consider naming the button “Add Alt Text” or “Add Alternative Text” instead of “Add Accessibility Description”? Here are three reasons you might want to do that:

• Familiarity. Folks coming from other platforms and tools might already be familiar with alt texts. WordPress, Medium, and Instagram, for example, use this naming convention. Users will immediately know what it is, instead of having to ask themselves “I wonder if Accessibility Description is the same as Alt Text?”
• Findability. For someone totally new to the concept of alternative texts, they will get a lot more relevant hits, guides, YouTube videos, and what not when researching “alt text” compared to “accessibility description”.
• Nitpicking. 😊 It really is a alternative text. Accessibility is a huge aspect of it, for sure. But the alternative text is also displayed when a browser can’t load images (for network reasons or user preference). Also, search engines often index alternative text to deliver better search results. (It’s an upcoming feature to my Search Space plug-in.)

@manton this is really cool! As someone that frequently uses the web version, I highly appreciate.
One tiny request: would it be possible to make forms in the web version to check for spelling? They currently don’t and frequently I have to type elsewhere and copy to MB just to be sure I am not making mistakes.

@manton Looks good.

Good to see you’ve included a way to add alternative text for the image.

I second what @sod wrote about changing the label for that button though.

@manton looks great! agree with @sod. Looking at what Twitter do out of interest as a point of comparison, their button reads ‘Add description’, then when you open that the tab say’s ‘Alt’, the label of field says ‘description’, and there’s a ‘what is alt text?’ help link. All a bit of a mix!

@alpower @furstenberg @sod @manton I’d like to put my vote in against using “alt text”. I much prefer the descriptive version as seen in the video.

@sod Interesting… I always thought of “alt text” is too nerdy, but maybe it’s mainstream enough now. I’m going to keep it as-is for now but we can consider changing it later. I want it to be consistent across the web and apps.

@alpower @sod I kind of feel like the “what is alt text?” link reinforces me feeling that “alt” is confusing to most people… But I don’t know. Twitter surely has more formal usability testing than we do!

@pcora We don’t have spelling enabled as you type, but at least on the Mac you can hit command-; for “Check spelling now” and it will highlight misspelled words. Thinking about replacing the web editor again in the future, though, for more options.

@manton @alpower @sod Yep that’s how I feel about it too. The name “alt text”, when said aloud, feels like an exclusionary developer-centric piece of technological jargon.

I think about the idea of writing a guide for adding the description, and in that guide if it was “alt text” I would include a section explaining what it is. Whereas, with something like “accessibility description” I can say something along the lines of “Use an accessibility description to make your image available to everybody.”

@manton thanks for this tip! it really helped!

@pcora Glad to hear it!