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lupi
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lori
@lori

if you are in the alt-text debate trenches...

Please read this article.

It's not what you're expecting. It's not a post about why alt text is important. It's not a post about how to write it well.

It's a post about access, and how access is seen by the people who feel they're providing access as a service, and whether or not that service is helpful or even welcome.

This post isn't meant to tell you whether you should use alt text. You should. Anything you write is better than having a screen reader say "image". "My cat" is more useful than image. Not leaving the box blank is always the right thing to do.

But I see a lot of discussions about accessibility that don't think about the broader subject, and this piece is vital to me to understanding that, as someone who is largely able bodied (I had only temporary visual impairments, so I've had screen reader experience but only in a temporary and basis), whose only real mental disability is ADHD which is nothing even coming close to something like being blind or deaf when interacting with the world.

I think it's important to get this person's message. For example when I see people fret over how to put alt text on their visual art, I keep thinking about the bit in this article about braille transcribed films, and how little this really means to the author and how little they care or are interested in this sad replacement for the experience of a film.

This isn't about alt text at the end of the day. But if we're going to have a big debate about alt text, like any other accessibility debate, I think the perspective here is so important. It absolutely will change the way you approach all accessibility. And it doesn't mean you will simply think it's no longer important, it absolutely is. But it will reframe how you approach it.

lori
@lori

Sharing this again as a complement to my alt text post because imo it is required reading for how people without a disability frame how they think about those with, and have no regard for their experiences. In a way you've maybe not encountered before.

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in reply to @lori's post:

EchoCian
@EchoCian

Oh this is really interesting and useful. It reminds me of signs of bad writing vs good and how show don't tell isn't always the best advice - or gets applied badly. You don't want to simply tell us a character has traits and then never show them in action, because then the showing and telling doesn't match. But you don't need to describe their outfit down to the number of buttons, because that isn't actually SHOWING anything about the character, either, it's still just telling the reader a bunch of random detail, even though such details are often considered "showing."

So typical ASL interpreters are taught to share an objective and thorough image to show a picture, but through a medium that is irrelevant, because the picture doesn't matter, so it is merely telling.

So maybe "tell if it shows something." You don't need to know every last detail of the image, you need to know the mood it's conveying and the key points that will get the meaning across to someone who does not give a shit about the number or color of stripes on a shirt. But if something has a notable texture, like my perler keychains being smooth on one side and kind of nubbly on the other, that's relevant for forming some kind of mental concept. (Don't know how I would describe pixel sprites in a meaningful way, though...)

This is mostly just the connection I made while reading the article that I thought was interesting. Maybe it could be a useful framework for someone, idk.

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virtueisdead
@virtueisdead

not gonna lie im not remotely involved in whatever discourse apparently surrounds this subject matter but thank you so much for introducing me to this article. it is one of my favorite things i have read. i have shared it with all my friends and family

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upthorn
@upthorn

This is a great article! But what I really want to comment on is that every time I see the tag a11y, all I can think about is the irony of using such inaccessible shorthand to discuss issues of accessibility.

(not criticizing your usage here, so much as the origin of the abbreviation.)

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lori
@lori

Oh I actually feel exactly the same way, but cohost being tag based sometimes you've gotta use the tags that are out there for discoverability. But yeah personally I'm not a fan of any of those abbreviations with numbers in the middle.

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Malusdraco
@Malusdraco

WCAG guidelines say no alt text is needed if the image is purely decorative- how that’s interpreted by the screen reader differs between systems. They also focus mostly on the utility of the image- not necessarily what it is.

I only say this cause I was about to make a post just like this about this particular article and how silly a lot of discussions around alt text are when they center delivering an Exact Experience of the image (unnecessary details included).

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lori
@lori

I've spoken to a blind accessibility expert about this actually (by which I mean both she is blind and she works in accessibility) and she believes that social media posts should not be treated the same way as, say, an informational website. So she suggested that the traditional rules for websites don't always match 1:1 to social media communication.

That being said yes people get hung up on trying to write this full on poetry alt text, and other people get hung up on the idea that they don't have the energy to write alt text because they think people are expecting that, when at the end of the day the answer is "just write something brief, but make sure you write something". "Painting I did of a cat" is better than "image", but a ten thousand word essay of every brush stroke of the cat isn't very helpful.

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Malusdraco
@Malusdraco

oh interesting- thanks for the insight. i did a deep dive a couple months back trying to find technical/accredited sources for alt text specifically for art (and social media by extension) and found. VERY little in terms of guidelines that weren't 'well, start from the background and then work your way through every excruciating detail.' it does make sense to treat social media differently though since there usually is more weight to images.

this reminds me of that video that floated around twitter of someone taking a recording of their screen reader interpreting a tweet with like, 70 red flag emojis to demonstrate why not to do that. it put a lot of what people were saying (and also the WCAG guidelines) into perspective- ANYTHING but waste people's time like that.

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lori
@lori

Most of my experience talking to folks about alt text has been on fedi (fedi has a lot of blind users both because of the high percentage of alt text and because of its overall accessibility support) and the best thing I could find to improve my alt text was just... asking blind users there what they'd prefer. I'd often find I got different answers from actual blind folk than allies repeating what they read in written guidelines (like with questions of "would you prefer a transcription of a text screenshot be in the alt text or in a reply"). And at the end of the day, what matters is being accessible to the people you're actually dealing with. A website won't know who is going to look at it, but on social media you can ask the people who follow you, or in some cases want to follow you--if your posts weren't accessible before--what they want. On social media, when it comes to what you as a user are posting, you have more room to be flexible and subjective than if you're someone designing a website or software.

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lori
@lori

This is also where structural accessibility issues come into play. I've never been able to get as much feedback from blind users as I have on fedi because most other platforms I've been on have been way more hostile to those users in their design, meaning coming across way less of them. I've learned a lot as a result.

Like here's an example: on the internet there's a prevailing idea that accounts without an avatar are spam accounts, and that to be taken seriously you should have an avatar. But...a lot of blind users don't set avatars! Which makes sense! I had never thought of that before seeing a ton of blind fedi users without avatars and it has made me stop assuming a lack of avatar means fake account. And this ties back into the kind of thing this article was about, if someone can't see an avatar, why should they necessarily care about avatars? Just because people who can see think they're important to have?

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Malusdraco
@Malusdraco

OH that's really interesting! they must be really good at recognizing usernames- i know when someone changes their icon for me they might as well be a different person.

you should put together what you've said into a shareable format cause i feel like it gives a LOT of context to this whole convo (if you have already send me a link, i'd love to share it)

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lori
@lori

I may do that sometime, at this point I'm mostly on cohost for rubbernecking as someone interested in following social media platforms on a meta level (like how each of them do business) but it is information I care about a lot. I'd want to dig up the conversations I had though and properly share what I learned from the people who live it though.

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Malusdraco
@Malusdraco

oh- actually a question. did you talk to aforementioned expert about like, putting alt text in the description of a post vs putting it in the alt text of the image itself? that's another thing i'd seen (pretty much exclusively on tumblr) where there was zero explanation for it that wasn't 'this person whose post i'm sharing didn't include it so i'm going to.' i find it baffling that people would put the alt text someone has already included into plain text, but if there IS a good reason i'd love to hear it.

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lori
@lori

I've talked to some blind folks about this kind of thing. This is of course going to be subjective, like anything else, but I will share what I've been told. Generally people don't want to hear a repeat of what you said in the post. So if you posted about how you just made a blue and green ceramic mug with tiny stars and a the handle is shaped like a dragon, you don't need to repeat all of that in the alt text. You do still need to make it clear what the image is of, but you don't need to repeat all the stuff you just said, because the screen reader is going to read the post too, the image doesn't just exist in isolation.

There are two bits of alt text advice that I've gotten from blind folks that are kind of my personal guiding principles:

  1. focus on what the point of posting the photo is. If I'm posting a photo of a dog on a couch, because I'm trying to show the couch (and the dog happens to be there), the alt text may mention the dog but it will mostly focus on the couch. If I'm posting the dog photo to talk about the funny look on my dog's face, or how cute she looks when she's asleep, I don't even really need to bring the couch up. In both cases, I don't need to start describing the bookshelves in the background, none of those posts are about them.

  2. To quote a user I follow directly: "a picture may be worth a thousand words but do I need all of them to continue?" You should add relevant details, but there's no need to write ridiculously long alt text, no matter what you write the person on the other end has to listen to a voice read it all to them. If you try a screen reader, or even try tossing your alt text into a text to speech program, you will very quickly see the point. So keep it concise.

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Dragaroths-hideaway
@Dragaroths-hideaway

Oh no I fully read through. And loved it. I love what theyre buildinf for themselves, i love what theyre reteaching to who want to help them, i love ALL that.
I just have the subjective view that what he's missing is the disconnection between what he thinks they're asking, and what he sees as the relation to that, and what they're doing.

The view strips honest attempts to help of that honesty. These are two incredibly different views of the world, and group 1 is, in error, filtering their experience into trying to show it to group 2.
That isn't selfishness, or self centerdness, it's simply the inability to see what they cant see. In the same way group 2 can't see group 1s way.

Ultimately, what the rest of the article discusses at length is exactly what a lot of the people before were asking; I just see that one little inclusion as like, an "itch" in an otherwise beautiful article. I agree with everything else he said, and am incredibly happy to hear that there's been such positive developments! My fatal flaw is the very human thing of clinging to the one negative thing that stands out.

Cuz otherwise, like I said, I get him. I just don't agree with that single part of the view towards others.

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doodlemancy
@doodlemancy

this DID totally change my perspective, thanks for linking it. i have been among the Yelled-At for sometimes skipping it (i have carpal tunnel syndrome and various brain being bad diseases) and i have wondered for quite some time how useful all those loquacious descriptions written by sighted people really are. this seems like a lot of "literal translation vs. localization" kinda stuff but for images. this helps me understand better what might be useful vs. what should be left unsaid

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