I’m filing this Under ‘I Learn something every day’

This post’s headline says it all.

Last October, I interviewed the developers behind Croissant for iOS and macOS. I can’t describe the app’s functionality better than its website does; it says Croissant is “a buttery smooth app for cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.” The two-person team of Ben McCarthy and Aaron Vegh told me, in part, Croissant wasn’t expressly built for accessibility’s sake, but nonetheless emanates as a byproduct. The duo’s overarching goal with Croissant was to make a piece of software which was “something simple and streamlined,” according to McCarthy. As I wrote, Croissant’s appeal in an accessibility context is that a disabled person needn’t have to manually post the same thing to multiple services. Although copy-and-paste is a workaround, but still involves extra taps—actions which can be taxing to many people out there who cope with any sort of cognitive/visual/motor conditions (or some combination thereof).

Thus, Croissant’s streamlining is accessibility too.

Anyway, one of my previous gripes about Croissant was there existed no button one could push to automatically generate image descriptions, or alt-text, for images. Lo and behold, I went to use Croissant on my iPhone earlier today and noticed a small button that does just that! I asked McCarthy about it on Mastodon and they replied by saying the text-generation feature isn’t new and, in fact, has “been there for a while.” I incorrectly presumed the feature used AI, but it doesn’t; McCarthy told me it works by way of Apple’s “VNRecognizeTextRequest” API, a tool which Apple describes to developers as “an image-analysis request that finds and recognizes text in an image.”

The moral here? Croissant’s accessibility game is even stronger. Go download it.