This hurts, because, it's true: "Silicon Valley will spend millions developing a glove that translates sign language into speech (badly), but they won't spend ten minutes adding Alt-Text to their images. They will build a headset that describes the room to me (poorly), but they won't use semantic HTML headings so I can actually navigate a webpage."
@stephaniewalter The classic Disability Dongle
Oct 19, 2026, 1:12 PM@stephaniewalter
Tech bros: "genAI improves accesibility! You're ableist if you don't love genAI!!"
genAI: creates inaccessible interfaces at scale.
@stragu I had techros go "but with agents you won't need to go on the website so it's fine agents will solve it we don't need accessibility". But my dudes let's just say this is true: you still need to make the agent accessible 🤷
Oct 20, 2026, 7:53 AM@stephaniewalter (I assume you mean "maake the agents accessible"?)
Yeah.
"Why tag web content properly when you can layer on top of your browser an overengineered, proprietary, subscription-based tool that burns coal to generate a picture description that misses the point? Look at me, I'm your forward-thinking saviour!"
@stragu Haa yeah I meant agents, I have big fingers and zero attention sorry.
I am kind of scared by the techpeople who think that with agents we won't need accessibility anymore, it's kind of missing a giant point. We will just shift the "make products accessible" into "make agent accessible" which, is also a giant problem in the end, it feels like overlay on steroids
@stephaniewalter it scares the blazes out of me!
I'll admit that text to voice is very useful
Forms, pages etc still need to be designed to support t-v
Many are not
@stragu
@stephaniewalter it’s PR. They aren’t developing anything for accessibility that isn’t going to be used for something else.
Also modern devs don’t understand basic HTML and all that is literally built in to accomplish the very same thing they need GB of storage and AI to do it the hard way. It’s all part of the “move fast and break things” mentality which is basically another way of saying “I don’t understand what is going on; so let me distract you”.
Oct 19, 2026, 3:26 PM@stephaniewalter
I didn't think much about alt text until I got active on here. At first it does add a bit of friction to posting an image, but I quickly got used to it and I honestly enjoy the thought process of writing good description of images (to be fair, I mostly post pictures of my cat, and I love telling people about her)
@jbowen haa I do enjoy writing them too, choosing what I describe to fit the purpose of my post. For me it's part of the writing the post exercice.
I always worry that my alt texts are sometimes a little bit long though, so I hope I'm not overdoing it.
Oct 20, 2026, 4:53 PM@stephaniewalter
Initially I was writing very dry, purely descriptive alt-text, but from reading what other people write I've been trying to be casual and warm/friendly in my descriptions to not only communicate what's in the picture, but what the vibe is (well, at least for the pictures of my cat or other fun stuff).
Oct 25, 2026, 1:58 PM@jbowen @stephaniewalter it's always fun to think about how I would actually read this, it's kind of freeing to write in a way I might speak aloud. It gets difficult with the kind of multilingual jokes I sometimes post, though- I wish there was a way to tag "switch to a swedish voice"
Oct 19, 2026, 8:54 PM@stephaniewalter they can sell the glove and the headset. Not much profit in alt-text or semantic html.
@stephaniewalter wait_its_all_divs_always_has_been_pew.png
@Varpie I am confused, what do you mean by "adjacent" solutions here?
@stephaniewalter And it would probably be way cheaper to give users a financial incentive to do spend their own time adding helpful content.
@stephaniewalter
Follow the money!
@stephaniewalter
No surprise here. Selling overpriced gadgets makes them visible money, making their online stuff properly accessible costs them money (that an accessible online presence might draw in or help keep people who might go on to spend money on their stuff is easy to overlook and hard to measure and won't look as good on next quarter's financial statement).
Oct 26, 2026, 10:56 AM@stephaniewalter The Silicon Valley folk seem to love 'playing' with technology. They seem to start conversations with "Y'know what would be cool?" rather than "I have an idea that would functionally improve people's lives."
you can just shove images against the AWS or Google image recognition API. So from their perspective that problem is solved.
Also do we really want people putting AI generated alt texts up? It's better when that kind of stuff is generated client side. So you at least know when someone wrote it themselves and it has more value...
@stephaniewalter No surprise; our accesibility has generally been second place to such things. I don't know how groups who don't even know of each other come to establishing such a priority, but it seems to happen a lot