Don’t Tweet Pictures of Text
December 21, 2014; One Comment
Good point @harper. pic.twitter.com/27tCMoDaGI
— Jeremy Scheuch (@jeremyscheuch) December 8, 2014
Earlier this week M.G. Siegler posted Hacking the Tweet Stream at Medium, where he describes the trend of posting images of text to do an end-run around Twitter’s character limits. His post quickly changes from descriptive to prescriptive, advocating for this behavior to bypass what he sees as a limitation of Twitter.
Christian Heilmann quickly responded to note what a bad idea this is (my words) in his post Great publishing works with the medium, not against it.
Reasons Not to Do It
Christian covered a few reasons why you shouldn’t rely on images, which I am including here from his Medium post:
- Maybe they are blind and can not see text in an image
- Maybe they are on a tiny device and whilst the font here is readable the text in a small JPG with artifacts is less so.
- Maybe they are on an unreliable connection and the image hasn’t loaded yet
- Maybe they have a mis-configured ad-blocker that is overzealous with its blocking
Let me add some more:
- Maybe the tweet isn’t in the reader’s native language and he/she wants to translate it.
- Maybe the text contrast is too [...]