It’s taken way too long, and was completed in what I might consider the most frustrating way. I’ve been working on and off towards getting support for Twitter’s API (Application Programming Interface) to add alternative text to Twitter images for years – literally since they first published the API. At first, the documentation was just broken. Later, it was no longer broken, but woefully incomplete.

I tried numerous variations to get it to work, and each time I’d eventually be frustrated and put it aside until later. I only have so much time available to work on this, after all.

Last week, it was time for my annual session of despairing at Twitter’s media API. As a starting point, I threw in the code I’d last been testing, to remind myself what the error I’d been wrestling with last had been.

And it worked. No changes at all to what I’d done previously; it just worked.

Completely missed the point of scheduling a solid week of being frustrated, but I guess that’s the way it goes sometimes! I just had to get my frustration over with quickly and start prepping the next release.

The lack of support for this critical feature has been a frustration for me for a long time, so I’m glad to finally see it finally available. I’m fully expecting that it will stop working again next week (not for any technical reason; just because this was so unexpected that I’m paranoid), so enjoy it while it lasts!

Oh, and I also added support for player cards with captions.