- Tech
‘May be an image’: what it’s like browsing Instagram while blind
The ridiculous sounds of social sites
Illustration by William Joel / The Verge
Jul 30, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC
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Using a screen reader to navigate Instagram, as some people with low vision do, is a strange patchwork of sounds. It can be overwhelming, especially if you’re used to quickly scanning information with your eyes, to hear a synthetic voice clunkily rattle off usernames, timestamps, and like counts as though they’re all equally important as the actual content of the post. Among all that auditory stimulation, if someone added alt text to their photo, you might hear something like “John and I standing with our ankles in the water at the beach. John is making a distressed face while I menacingly hold out a dead crab and laugh.”