My friend Steph who writes for The Inqisiter wrote this piece yesterday. Very well written.
From the article
"Partway through July, I started thinking about Facebook memes and how inaccessible they can be to people with visual impairment. I decided that for the rest of the month, I’d transcribe any memes I shared, and see if I could make it a habit. Once I started, I realized just how often social shares are actually pictures of text — which people who are blind or have impairment of vision cannot read.
Maybe you’re wondering how someone with visual impairment is accessing Facebook at all. The answer is that many use screen readers. Others have some visual impairment, but see well enough to read some text.
The problem with a screen reader, of course, is that it doesn’t “see” the text, in the visual sense — it’s a program and it “reads” only what is recognized as text, which means something typed out. If you take a photo of yourself and write “Selfie day!” across it and post it on Facebook, a screen reader won’t see those words as text, but as part of a visual image it should skip. If you want your friends with visual impairment to see those words, you may need to type them out."
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