Those pictures of text are a convenient workaround for social media’s character limit — but they’re a big problem for the blind. Here’s why everyone should care.
Michelle Rial/BuzzFeed
Back in January, in a baptismal post, BuzzFeed's Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Mat Honan christened the next trend to take over the social web: the "screenshort." He explained the phenomenon — "a chunk of text, screen-shotted, and embedded in a tweet" — and prescribed, firmly: "The bottom line is, if you want someone to read something on Twitter, don't just link to it. Post a screenshort as well."
The premise behind the screenshort is old, but the hype is new, and Honan wasn't the only one trumpeting it. By late last year, bloggers were calling it a trend, and by the beginning of this one, major outlets such as the New York Times, BuzzFeed, Politico — even The Onion — were adopting the 'short as a convenient work-around to social media (mostly Twitter)'s character restrictions. In a post from March, BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel wrote of the screenshort: "It's a work-around to Twitter's 140-character limit that doesn't abuse the constraint as much as enhance it." In April, The Next Web noted that celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Pink, and Lorde had adopted the screenshort as a bare-bones blogging tool, ultimately declaring that the traditional blog had been "killed by screenshorts." At this point, a cursory scroll through Twitter — and, to a lesser extent, Instagram and Facebook — yields a consistent stream of these pictures of text.
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