User Interview Analysis

Summary of a key findings:

Every user has different needs.

No two people use the same combination of accessibility tools or settings across multiple devices. Several users them lean more towards screenreaders, several lean more towards magnification. This means that great care will need to be taken in order to design a tool a wide variety of users will consider helpful.

Most users use mobile as their primary way of navigating the web and social media

Desktop is becoming less and less common as the main way people interact with the internet, though some users use it deliberately for specific tasks. This is also consistent with the general public's technology usage.

AI vs. Humans. Whoever's writing it, the user wants to know!

All participants felt that labelling alt text as AI-generated or human-written was appreciated. It increases user trust and helps users judge the reliability and tone of a description.

This reinforces the point that AI can be very useful for some tasks, but its descriptions should be taken with a grain of salt. At best they lack context and don’t fully understand the image or its purpose, and at worst they’re flat-out wrong. Still, by and large, AI descriptions are better than no description.

Images with embedded text present unique challenges.

Often, people who upload an image with embedded text (an event flier, for example) to social don't include all the same information found in the image (or practical additional context) in the text portion of a post. As a result, a low vision user may struggle with extracting the information from that image - when, where, or who is involved etc. When a user screenshots the image and drops it into Chatgpt, for example, it's a toss-up whether or not they will learn everything they were hoping to learn.

A Note About Bluesky:

One user drew our attention to Bluesky and the apps efforts towards Alt Text visibility. Bluesky takes a more proactive approach to alt text than other social media platforms.

Read More About Bluesky

It indicates visually whether an image has ALT Text (with a small black indicator in the bottom left corner of the image) and can serve as a model for developing this feature on other platforms. Bluesky also encourages the user to write their own alt text when posting their images, and this probably also reinforces why there is more alt text on that platform.

Bluesky's Alt Text Display. Note the small ALT button in the bottom right hand corner of the image below.