It is well-known to even Facebook and Instagram users without any visual impairment that social platforms’ algorithms favour visual content. As a result, profile owners are increasingly communicating with posts featuring photos and videos. It is little known, however, that visually impaired people can only get information about such content from alt. text, that is, alternative texts assigned to images as a description read by a screen reader. Unfortunately, many users fail to add this text to ensure digital accessibility when uploading content which means that such content remains inaccessible to the visually impaired.
No image remains invisible when turned into a poem
October is the month of sight. Yettel used this opportunity to create a special book of poems for visually impaired social media users. Yettel’s social media platforms featured nine poets including Bence Bárány, Boebeck, Bence Borsos, Gabriella Kemény, Zsófi Kemény, János Lackfi, Márton Simon, Barna Baranyai and Dániel Nagy sharing their poems about a series of photos published on our platforms. The photos depicting various parts of Budapest are accompanied by poems in alt. text created specifically for the visually impaired describing the beauty and story of the photos in the most vivid way.
When opening the first image of the photo series, visually impaired users are greeted with the following message: “Dear follower, you are now listening to the alt. text of this photo. This is just for you. In this post, you will find 9 photos. Their alternative texts include poems inspired by them, written by local writers, poets and slammers. We hope you will like them. With this initiative, we want to do something special for you on World Sight Day and get more people use the alt. text feature of Facebook and Instagram that can bring online content closer to you. Here comes the first poem: ...”
Yettel for digital accessibility
The campaign is combined with a commitment: from now on, Yettel will fill in the alt. text fields of the photo content posted on Facebook and Instagram, as well as on the yettel.hu website carefully, in line with accessibility criteria, so that the visually impaired can follow its content as closely as possible. It also encourages other brands and content creators to do the same and help visually impaired people become active members of their communities.