I asked an AI to write a song about Changeling and Alex. I kept adding verses until the story got too big for a song, so I asked for it to be told in the style of Star Wars. Here we are.

In a galaxy far, far away,

The land of the Changeling was a place of magic and wonder,

Where a young girl named Alex

And a shape-shifting creature called the Changeling

Roamed and explored together,

Their bond growing stronger with each adventure.

But one day, the land of the Changeling

Was struck by a great darkness,

And Alex and the Changeling

Were forced to flee their home,

Searching for a new place to live.

They stumbled upon a planet called Earth,

And discovered a new form of entertainment called Twitch,

Where they began to stream their adventures,

Amusing and inspiring the inhabitants of this strange new world.

But they soon faced a new enemy,

The trolls and haters who tried to ruin their fun,

But with the power of their magic,

Alex and the Changeling fought back,

Banishing the trolls and winning over their viewers.

One day, a powerful being called Elon

Discovered their stream,

And he was impressed by their magic and charm,

So he offered to make them stars,

And they agreed to join him on his journey.

With Elon, they traveled the galaxy,

Entertaining and inspiring countless beings,

But Elon had a hidden agenda,

To use their magic to conquer the social media site called Twitter,

And make it his own.

But Alex and the Changeling

Soon realized the error of their ways,

And they decided to betray Elon,

Feeding him to a fearsome dragon named Kanye,

And reclaiming Twitter as their own.

They used their magic to make Twitter a place of positivity and light,

Banishing the trolls and bringing joy to all who visited.

And so, Alex and the Changeling lived happily ever after,

Roaming and exploring the galaxy,

Bringing magic and wonder wherever they went

I just bought an plan so I can do my job. Relying solely on stuff just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
Yesterday, Instagram announced two new features it was adding to make the platform more accessible to visually impaired users. First, newly uploaded photos would have automatically generated alt (descriptive) text added to them. This feature is powered by the same technology that Facebook added to its platform a few years ago, which attempts to determine and name the objects in posted photos, and make those results available to screen readers so users of the software can benefit from the description. These days, that technology has advanced enough so that a lot of the memes people post and share on both of these platforms can be enjoyed by visually impaired users.

Second, users of Instagram have the option to add alt text to photos they post, potentially providing a more detailed description for their visually impaired followers. This is similar to the way Twitter and Mastodon have decided to handle making images accessible. While this is a huge step forward for the platform, and while I had lots of fun testing the feature on my own Instagram account, there are a couple things that need to be worked out before I adopt it as my main outlet for nurturing my interest in photography.

Complicated Execution

The process for adding custom alt text to photos when you post them on Instagram is somewhat complicated. In addition to the normal steps for posting a photo such as adding filters and captions, you actually have to click the advanced settings at the bottom of the posting screen, add the alt text, then share the photo. To be fair, this is still easier than Twitter’s execution, which requires you to go into the accessibility section of your Twitter settings and enable the option to add alt text before it even becomes available in the tweet posting box. Mastodon offers the option to add a description to photos right out of the box, and that makes it the best, but all three of these platforms are handling the ability to add custom descriptions better than Facebook. Facebook does allow custom alt text to be added to photos. At the time of this writing, this help article explains that this is only possible from a computer. After expressing my displeasure about this, on the Facebook accessibility home page, I arcvd a response that the vthe version of the iOS app released today does allow the editing of alt text, though in an extremely complicated way.

Alt Text Does Not Transfer

My interest in photography is a growing thing, and I want to share the experience with as many people on as many platforms as possible, and I want to make sure it’s an accessible experience. When I found out that Facebook wouldn’t let me edit the alt text of photos, I thought: Hmm. Instagram lets you cross-post to a number of services, including Facebook. I bet if I add the alt text on Instagram and cross-post to Facebook, that’ll solve the problem.

Unfortunately, no. When I went to my Facebook timeline and looked at the photos, I either got the message that no alt text was available, or the automatically generated stuff that Facebook’s been putting out for a few years now. The alt text was also not posted to Twitter. One possible work-around is to configure an IFTTT applet that posts Instagram photos as native Twitter photos, but I haven’t tested this yet. It’s worth noting that if you cross-post from Twitter to Mastodon, the alt text is transferred 98% of the time.

Conclusion

Instagram’s support for automatic alt text and its giving users the ability to add custom alt text to photos is a huge step for accessibility. However, as a blind person who is posting more photos and wants to make sure their posts are accessible on all platforms, the experience is missing a couple of key features I need for it to become my main platform for sharing my experience as I develop my interest in photography. Right now, I’m separately posting to each network, and adding descriptions in the main post section of Facebook. There’s more effort involved, but the end result, to me, is worth the extra energy.

The General Idea

For those of you who don’t know, this site is mostly about my goal of becoming a blind photographer. I decided that the first step I should take was to train myself to interact with pictures. Places like Twitter are rich with pictures of all kinds, and I always spent my energy ignoring them unless they had descriptions, an occurrence that is rare going on nonexistent. It is one of those situations where the world wasn’t going to change unless I did. So, just in case you missed my blurb about it on the home page, I began using Seeing AI to analyze pictures.

I almost Overdid It

Let’s face it, folks. Not every picture that gets posted on social media is interesting, just like not every chicken strip is nice and crispy. After fifty or sixty selfies, cat pics, memes, etc., the process of analyzing each picture gets BORING!!! If you’re one of the people whose selfies I ran cross, don’t take it personally. I just overdid things, and analyzing pics went from being a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon to something a little too close to working in a processing center. If I was going to keep working toward my goal, I needed to make sure I had a reason to keep going. That reason, as it turns out, is the same one that encourages people to share pictures in the first place–the social benefits of sharing your experiences.

Building an Interactive Road to That First Milestone

At the same time I decided to start this thing, I was also becoming involved with Mastodon, another microblogging service. I could go on and on about the differences between it and Twitter, but the main one is that the culture on Mastodon supports every kind of social group you can imagine, including but not limited to aspiring blind photographers. The process was simple. I requested that people could send me pics, I would analyze them, and try to guess what the picture was. If I got it right, everyone went away happy. If not, the person had to tell me what the picture was, and then we could have a good laugh over the errors of computers. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last month or so. That, and programming friends into my camera for future use, a process I will describe in a future post. For now, I’m continuing to interact with people and their pics, and it has two results. First, it keeps me interacting with photos, and keeps me engaged. Second, it raises awareness of how AI helps people, and gives people an idea of how to describe their pictures when they post them, a topic I will also cover in a future post.

What’s the Next Step?

The next step is to get myself used to incorporating emojis into my self-expression. A picture is worth a thousand words, and emojis are just little pictures, aren’t they? Maybe I’ll write an entire post in emojis.