Monday, May 13, 2024

The Ask a Human Algorithm and a learning curve: instagram and a search engine.

 Another #GAAD #GAAD2024 post with a spritz of Mother's Day celebration.


Device free family gatherings are a thing of the past, and people seem to have gotten used to it. 


This year's Mother's Day dinner conversation turned to Instagram. Instagram is a pretty unfamiliar for part of the family. For one thing there is the part below about "some screen reader users may have trouble navigating."


Nephew's biggest social network is on Instagram. It's about Subarus and off-roading. He has a huge following and his latest topic to go viral is about "regearing the CVT" For more on this topic see How Subaru owners are regearing their CVT so they crawl better


Interesting topic if one is into Subaru off-roading. Of more interest was a fast user eye view of Instagram. So now, thank you nephew,  Instagram is on RantWoman's list of platforms maybe to experiment with.


First RantWoman has to figure out logging on.


But in the meantime, what if the topic is accessibility and social media. 


Here are some suggestions from a Bing search:


Accessibility on Instagram

Please take seriously the note that some screen reader users will have trouble navigating in Instagram.)


How to make your Instagram post more accessible


So basically, people creating their own content should follow best practices about hashtags, alt text, contrast and transcripts for audio.


Special note gleaned from an event run-through: please AVOID text in images. The text is inaccessible to search engines, screen readers and automated translation algorithms


But what if, say, an outside organization asks for help to distribute material they have created that is a graphic with a lot of text. Regular Instagram posters can try and see what Instagram AI does with all that text. But sometimes it will make sense just to make sure that alt text contains really basic info such as the topic, date, time, and location of an event or a contact url, email, or phone number.


Now stay tuned to see which identities RantWoman might unleash on Instagram.



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