Justin Yarbrough talks about alt text

Justin asks us to think outside of our use case, and that not everyone uses the web the way we do. Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairment, and what barrier they encounter on the web. Today, I'm talking with Justin Yarbrough. Hey, Justin, how are you? Justin Doing pretty good today? How about you? Nic I'm quite happy. I'm quite happy. Happy to finally connect, as we were talking about in before the recording. It's been nearly three years since we've been planning to do this chat. So it's, it's good to finally connect in front of a microphone. Justin Yes, yes. Nic So just let me start by asking you, what's your disability or your impairment? Justin So I am almost completely blind. I just have a little light perception. Nic Okay, almost completely blind. And what would you say your greatest barrier or pet peeve on the web is? Justin Boy, where do I start? The one I can think of, that I've been kind of tinkered around on my head today was we were thinking about this is just on Twitter, which is, you know, where we kind of met know each other, is just folks not using alt text. I mean, you know, it's such a visual medium, everyone loves all their pictures. And it's like, I want to know what you're talking... what you're posting about, or, or more even, you know, the even where it really gets under my skin isn't maybe necessarily just okay, it's, you know, someone showing their picture of what they have for lunch, or whatever. But where it really gets me is, it's like, politicians, news organization, something like that. And they, they're that trend, they just love taking that screenshot of their statement, or whatever, and just posting that thing without any alt text. So that, you know, if I see something firm, I will just give you an example, like the mayor of Phoenix, early in the pandemic, you know, she was all the time posting updates like that, and those never had alt text on them. So I had no idea what the mayor was, you know, tweeting about at that, at that time, you know, what, what are we trying to find out and you know, early in the pandemic, stuff coming from folks like them, it was kind of important. Nic It sounds like, from what I'm seeing a lot of is more and more organizations are moving to social media to pass on some critical information around emergency messaging, and nine times out of 10. It's through an image of text, and there's no alt text. So folks, like you who rely on alt texts are really up the creek without a paddle. Justin Yeah, yeah, that's a really, that's a great way to describe it. You know, it's, I need this information too, hello, it's important enough that you're sharing it, share it, so everyone can take advantage. Nic What I find interesting is, I've been talking about the importance of alternate text on the web, since the mid 1990s. And I just feel like I never managed to reach everyone that needs to be reached, do you have any ideas how we can expand the reach and make sure that the people that need to hear about it, a hear about it and be start implementing these, these habits of making images accessible to all? Justin I think that, you know, a lot of a lot of the times with it, if you know, we have groups like this maybe you know, political candidates or folks who are in office or government organizations or stuff like that, what I've been doing a lot is I just say, you know, I just have been posting kind of a simple reply, hey, kind of like just going like, hey, blind guy here. Next time, could you please include alt text just so that I can understand what's going on here too. And then I throw in a link to the article actually up on my own website that I'd written about using alt texts on social media a few years ago. And does it get the attention? Sometimes it actually, you know, sometimes it kind of gets