The Live Text icon for alt text on social
Hey there! Not sure what alt text is or why it's important? Start with my article here: Alt text 101 for Bluesky; that article applies to other social apps as well.
When posting images to social platforms like Bluesky, Instagram, Reddit, etc, it's important to include alt text that describes each image. If an image contains text, like a screenshot from a news article, then we must include all relevant text in the alt text. This is part of our ethical responsibility regarding accessibility.
If you're accessing Bluesky on an iPhone or iPad, you can use the Live Text icon to extract text from images in order to copy and paste it into your alt text. It's this icon, which appears in the lower-right corner of an image you're viewing that contains text:
This icon doesn't only appear when you're using social apps; it'll also appear when viewing images in your photo album. It's just a built-in part of iOS for when you're viewing any image with text in it.
Issues/challenges:
- The Live Text functionality is a native feature in iOS, so it's not available when using the Bluesky desktop website. As for Android, Google says there's a way to do the same thing using Google Lens, but I don't have an Android so I don't know how it works exactly. Give it a try if you have one!
- I find that operating this Live Text functionality on iOS can feel pretty clunky; it can be difficult to select the text in exactly the way that you want to. It often takes multiple tries. It can be an annoying experience. Still, better than typing in all that text manually!
- While dark graphical text on a plain white background (like a screenshot from a news article) is usually interpreted correctly, any other kind of text may be interpreted with errors — e.g. text over a complex background, text that uses an unusual font, scans of printed materials that aren't perfectly straight, photos of signs, etc etc. In all of these cases, the user (that's you) must read the interpreted text and make any necessary corrections manually.
- Even when the graphical text is interpreted correctly by the app, you may still need to do some reformatting of the text to make it logical and digestible — e.g. some sentences may be broken up onto multiple lines in a way that reads as clunky and, well, just downright wrong. It's our responsibility to correct all this.
Making sure to include good, correct, useful alt text every time takes some effort, but it's worth it! Hopefully this tool will save you some time.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.