Hyderabad: X (formally Twitter) since Saturday was flooded with posts of the "Click Here" trend. While a lot of people have jumped on this popular trend, many others are still confused by the new feature. Through its official X accounts, prominent political parties like the Congress, Aam Aadmi Party and Bharatiya Janata Party have also actively participated in the trend.
The trend has confused hundreds of users as an image with a simple white backdrop and the words "click here" in a large black font, along with a downward-pointing diagonal arrow, is making rounds on the microblogging site.
The diagonally downward arrow points to the left side, to the ‘alt text’, or alternative text section. This feature helps users add a text description to the photos that they upload on the platform. According to experts, the feature can help the visually challenged to understand the image with the help of text-to-speech recognition and Braille language.
Photo descriptions as part of the alt text feature can be up to 420 characters. The alt text feature was introduced on X in 2016.
Here are some of the "Click Here" posts of parties: The BJP ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, sharing a “Click here” post wrote a message in Hindi in the alt text section, “Phir ek baar Modi sarkar (Modi sarkar once again).”
While the Aam Aadmi Party wrote, “Come to Ramlila Maidan on March 31 to save the country.” Some of the users seemed confused about the trend.
Shiv Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi wrote, “What is the click here pic story? My timeline is full of it!”
Explaining the feature, another user Mohammed Zubair wrote “The Alt text is supposed to contain a textual description of what the image contains, to help the visually impaired people understand what the image is about. So, using that text for anything else is a misuse of that feature and goes against web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG).”
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