Reading alt text within Tweetdeck scheduled tweets?

January 28, 2021 10:23 AM

Previously, I was put in charge of a twitter feed for work, scheduling tweets in advance using Tweetdeck. My tweets are required to include images. I add alt text to images for tweets I schedule, but is there a way for me to check whether images in upcoming tweets scheduled by others actually include alt text?

There are a bunch of tweets scheduled in our Tweetdeck that were handled by someone else no longer here. And since in Tweetdeck you can't edit tweets that have images (ugh), in order to be sure that these scheduled tweets have proper alt text, I would have to copy/download, delete, redo, and reschedule all of them.

Is there a way to save myself all that work? I've been poking around at scheduled tweets that I myself wrote/scheduled, that I know have alt text, to see if there's a way for me to view the alt text within Tweetdeck. No luck so far, but then I know very little about it.

Things I have tried:

* Hovering over and clicking on the images inside Tweetdeck. Result: nothing.

* Installing "Image Alt Text Viewer" extension in Chrome. Result: little colored boxes come up in various fields, but none of them show the alt text I know is in there, and in fact a couple of the ones placed over an image that definitely has alt text, say things like "Empty alt attribute" and "Missing alt attribute".

* Installing Adrian Roselli's bookmarklet for displaying tweet image alt text. Result: it works for images in tweets already tweeted that I'm looking at through twitter's own site, but I haven't been able to make it work inside Tweetdeck.

* "Inspect Element" within my browser. I might not be looking in the right place, because this is complicated, but I've looked around as best I can.

* Entirely turned off image display for my browser. Result: things like our account's Twitter avatar show the alt text '[ourname's] avatar', but the scheduled tweet images with alt text don't display anything at all, either within the context of the tweet, or when clicked through. They're just black space, no alt text.

That's the best I can do so far, just flailing around. What all am I missing?

posted by theatro to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Hi -- this has been on my mind since you wrote it because it seems like it should be a simple thing and it is not. I found, today, a greasemonkey script that seems to work in web-based tweetdeck. I don't have any scheduled tweets but it seems to work in the other columns. Here's the tweet where I found out about it and here's the page for the script itself. You'll need to install Greasemonkey and then this operates as a script within it. It's all clicking though, so it shouldn't be too technical.
posted by jessamyn at 10:29 AM on February 20, 2021

Response by poster: Oooh, thank you, Jessamyn! I hadn't checked my Recent Activity lately, and this was a nice surprise to come back to. I'll happily give it a try.
posted by theatro at 12:35 PM on February 27, 2021 [1 favorite]