I’ve noticed an accessibility issue when our marketing team uses HubSpot to create a schedules post to LinkedIn. They complete the alt text for any images in HubSpot, but this alt text disappears and is replaced with a generic “No alternative text description for this image” in the LinkedIn post. I’ve seen the same thing on other LinkedIn posts (including those on the HubSpot LinkedIn).
Is this a known bug? If so, does anyone know when it might be fixed? It’s quite an obstacle for us, as we’re often targetting users of assistive technologies, such as screen readers, for user research.
Hey @NCampbell9 when you’ve said it happens on other posts outside of HubSpot it makes me believe this may be a linkedin issue. Linkedin have a lot of surprising quirks to their posts, I know they cache images immediately and it can take some time to get rid of them, meaning as soon as you “preview” a post, linkedin caches it and uses that for the previews for some time (I believe about 14 days) even if you update your post.
My suspicion here is that you’re previewing the post with the image within HubSpot prior to adding the alt text, then linkedin is caching it and saving it for some time.
One workaround to avoid this in the future might be to enter the alt text prior to adding the image if possible. Otherwise this may just be a drawback of using an additional frontend/scheduling tool for linkedin.
If you do see this happening however and want to resolve it, linkedin have a post inspector tool which shows more detail on your linkedin post and how it works which might help you resolve the issues with your posts!
many thanks for that, sounds entitely possible. I’ll pass it on to our social media team and see if it’s a workaround.
However, it was HubSpot’s own LinkedIn feed I was talking about seeing excatly the same issue on - see the same generic “No alternative text description for this image” alt text has been added to the most recent HubSPot post.
That said, I’m having a dig around LinkedIn posts in general and I can see some pretty terrible alt text implementaions (eg alt text can be added fine for your post, but when that post appears in a search it gets replaced by generic alt=“Image preview”). Think I’ll see if I can get an answer out of LinkedIn (wish me luck).
Thanks for your help though!
Interesting! Thanks for passing on your findings! It looks like according to the official integration docs for linkedin Alttext isn’t required, so it’s entirely likely that this was just omitted by the integration.