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“Honestly I Never Really Thought About Adding a Description”: Why Highly Engaged Tweets Are Inaccessible

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Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 (INTERACT 2021)

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Abstract

Alternative (alt) text is vital for visually impaired users to consume digital images with screen readers. When these image descriptions are not incorporated, these users encounter accessibility challenges. In this study, we explore the prevalence and user understanding of alt text in Twitter. First, we assess the availability of alt text by collecting the Twitter Engagement (TWEN) dataset which contains over 1000 high engagement tweets regarding online articles from the most popular Google Keywords. We focused on keywords that create an engagement in Twitter in order to study the possibility of creating priorities of media content that missing alt text then adding descriptions to them by crowdsourcer to help the visually impaired to be equal like others in the social media communities. Our findings reveal approximately 91% of the tweets contained images and videos, less than 1% of the images had alt text. Thus, even highly engaged tweets remain inaccessible to visually impaired individuals. Thus, we designed two guided concepts to raise awareness of high engagement. We then surveyed 100 sighted participants to understand their perception of alt text and evaluate strategies to increase the frequency of alt text for highly engaged content. Our value-based guided concept was well received by the majority of the study participants.

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Acknowledgment

We thank Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU) and Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission to the USA (SACM) for financially supporting Mallak Alkhathlan. We thank the US Department of Education P200A180088: GAANN grant and the WPI Data Science Department for financially supporting ML Tlachac. We thank Brittany Lewis and the WPI DAISY lab for their advice and support.

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  1. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, 01609, USA

    Mallak Alkhathlan, M. L. Tlachac, Lane Harrison & Elke Rundensteiner

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  1. Mallak Alkhathlan
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  2. M. L. Tlachac
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  3. Lane Harrison
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Correspondence to Mallak Alkhathlan , M. L. Tlachac , Lane Harrison or Elke Rundensteiner .

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  1. Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Ardito

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Rosa Lanzilotti

  3. Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alessio Malizia

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, UK

    Helen Petrie

  5. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Antonio Piccinno

  6. Computer Science Department, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy

    Giuseppe Desolda

  7. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Kori Inkpen

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Alkhathlan, M., Tlachac, M.L., Harrison, L., Rundensteiner, E. (2021). “Honestly I Never Really Thought About Adding a Description”: Why Highly Engaged Tweets Are Inaccessible. In: Ardito, C., et al. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021. INTERACT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12932. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85623-6_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85623-6_23

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