David Barter

Alt Context

Alt Context is a service that synergizes with Instagram to deliver a comprehensible context to visual media in text form, intended to expand on alt-text and create a community of people contextual descriptions of visual media, making social connections between visually impaired and non-visually impaired users, providing the resources for visually impaired users to self-sufficiently understand the context of visual media on Instagram through bottom-up communal means, and significantly improving Instagram’s utility for the visually impaired community.

“Digital literacy is a set of skills that is in ever-increasing demand for employability, decision making, maintenance of social relationships, and much more in our everyday lives. Despite the characteristic resilience and adaptability that they so often show, visually impaired people face incredible challenges in this area, as a result of the reliance on visual access and comprehension of the context of visual media in digital settings, which has resulted in less engagement, less opportunity and less connection in the visually impaired community compared to those with vision.Alt Context is an approach to bridging this gap by crowdsourcing descriptions of the context of individual instances of visual media and providing these descriptions to visually impaired users in a similar manner as alt-text, readable through screen readers. Situated initially on the Instagram platform, it provides visibility for the need for descriptions of visual context to all users through a feature with which visually impaired users can request these descriptions for individual posts, and all other users can see these requests and potentially provide a response. Users who participate will be rewarded with points and badges that showcase their time spent on this socially good cause and can be shared on Instagram for all other users to see.The accompanying app for this service streamlines the activity of requesting and responding by making the requests and responses organized and searchable and allows for easy access to user profile information for the users participating, in order to establish trusting relationships. It is also possible (and incentivized) to designate users as trusted sources when their responses are found to be very helpful, and even form one-on-one social connections with users on the basis of being a preferred source for Alt Context, and on becoming knowledgeable of a specific visually impaired person’s needs for it, improving empathy and overcoming the barriers of vulnerability.Alt Context on Instagram has the potential to drastically improve its user experience for the visually impaired community, despite the focus on visual communication, and with that, the potential to attract and retain a significantly higher number of users. If successful on Instagram, this service could expand to serve any participatory digital space that is difficult for visually impaired people to access because of the presence of visual media. It is also possible, with significant awareness and comprehension of this service and its outcomes, to bridge into the use of Computer Vision technology, trained by users so that one model can provide Alt Context for many sources of digital media, and improve the potential of self-sufficient resources for digital literacy more efficiently in the future.”