Instagram Post Scraper - Alt text
Hi!
I'm working on an academic project regarding alt text on Instagram but the posts I scraped came back with no alt texts (except for some child posts). I watched Apify's YouTube introduction to this particular Scraper and it seemed like the posts returned with alt text. Am I missing something?
Does it only return manually added alt text and cannot pull the automatic alternative text that Instagram uses otherwise?
I'm not a developer so please go easy on me 😅
9 Replies
genetic-orange•3y ago
the ALT text is a short description about the photo or video for people with dissabilities or screen readers, that means the users who make the posts decide to put some description (alt text) or not, so in some cases u dont have the alt text, that means the user didn't put it, so I would suggest to try to get the alt text or the description
absent-sapphireOP•3y ago
Okay, I know what the alt text is. The problem is that Instagram has something called automatic alternative text (AAT) that is generated dynamically, not a permanent part of the markup, so my guess is that the scraper does not get that text. So far I have been only able to access AAT via screen reader or Image Alt Text Viewer plugin for Chrome. It would be great if I could scrape the AAT with Apify since it's going to be a it of a hassle to jot down couple of hundreds of alt texts manually.
unwilling-turquoise•3y ago
Hey @Deleted User! I tried to run it and see what you mean - passed the question to the team. Will write back once I have some info.
absent-sapphireOP•3y ago
Thank you very much! I appreciate it
unwilling-turquoise•3y ago
So I got a response from the team -
Instagram removed actual data for non-logged users from UI and api feedabsent-sapphireOP•3y ago
Hm, just the automatic alternative text, I take it? Because I still got some of the manual input, I think.
unwilling-turquoise•3y ago
One more thing I got from the dev:
without login either value removed or property removed, internally its accessibility_captionabsent-sapphireOP•3y ago
Thank you
@Deleted User just advanced to level 1! Thanks for your contributions! 🎉