Add Alt Text to Instagram Images#1048

While we can add alternative text to Twitter images for screenreaders, I’d like to see the same features for Instagram and Facebook. I think it’s very important for businesses in this day and age to offer as many accessiblity options to their customers (and our customers, by extensions) by filling in these gaps and providing as much information as we can - not only for the visually impaired, but also those with bad internet connections who might rely on alt text when images won’t load. At the moment, if we want to add alt text to images, I need to go in after Publer has posted something, and edit the post to add it, which defeats the purpose of using a scheduler a little in my opinion, and I’d like to see this changed.

Hi Alex,

You can now add an Alt text for Facebook photos, but due to API limitations, this is not possible for Instagram.

More info: https://help.publer.io/en/article/how-to-insert-alt-text-for-images-hm88y1/

Hi - you cannot add alt text for Facebook photos. It only shows up as the caption if you do multiple posts. I sent in a bug report about it a while back, but was told it was not currently possible to add alt text to facebook images via publer and I should suggest it as a feature if I wanted to see it.

Hi Alex,

For Facebook, the text that you write in photos will be used as both the Alt text and the caption.

In that case, there is a bug or glitch, because I have been adding caption/alt text to my photos for months and not once has it appeared on Facebook as alt text - it always uploads with just the default alt text, even when Twitter works.

This was recently added for Facebook. Please try it one more time :)

My last attempt was Tuesday - has it been added since then?

Looking at the logs, none of your recent posts had a caption / alt text set up for Facebook.

Please try it one more time following this tutorial:

https://help.publer.io/en/article/how-to-insert-alt-text-for-images-hm88y1/

I just ran a quick test and it worked as expected:

https://www.facebook.com/testblloku/photos/a.320685641859376/946400619287872/

That was how I did it, but I will try again for tomorrow’s post and submit a bug report if it does not work.

Please can this be made a priority and take off ‘On Hold’ - it really is important for Instagram posts to be able to have Alt Text.

May I also suggest that you add the ability to add the Alt Text to Graphics in our Media libray in the same way we can add labels that are then taken into the post when we choose the graphic - hope that makes sense :)

Hi Jaki,

This is on hold due to API limitations from Instagram itself.

Regarding your other suggestion, please submit it as a separate thread.

Hey Publer, has this been now made possible by Instagram? It’s been two years since the last message in this thread. Thanks!

Hi @Niklas Franke. Unfortunately, no updates. Rest assured that we’re always on top of things and will definitely let everyone know if something changes :)