Reads everything but the room

As someone who had to use a screen reader for a bit due to an acute condition I went through some years ago:

These are good descriptions of the image. They are not Good Image Descriptions when you are using a screen reader to navigate the web. You have to understand that when you're using a screen reader you have to sit and wait for a text to speech engine to read every single thing to you. You can't just quickly skim with your eyes. So everything that's repetitive or lengthy becomes extremely tedious. Even just a regularly recurring menu item being called "Make a post" instead of "post" becomes tedious especially if there's another button called "Make a message" or something so you have to pause and wait to hear which one it is. Most websites are extremely frustrating because nobody thinks about this. Everyone thinks people want an audiobook experience where a human being gently describes the website to you. That becomes tedious and frustrating quickly. This happened when audio books were first invented too actually. Sighted people made these long beautiful radioplay-like experiences and people would just turn the vinyl player up to 2.5× speed so they could read the book as quickly as a sighted person. This is why modern audiobooks don't sound like radioplays anymore.

When skimming through social media, I did not want every single image to start reading me an audiobook. I wanted to just be told "a white cat" keeping it just as brief as a sighted person experiences it.

The rule of thumb is this: Hearing an image description through your screen reader shouldn't take longer than it takes a sighted person to look at the image. Especially on social media where you want to know quickly if you're going to dismiss it and move on to the next post.

If it's a very complicated or dense image, then write the post body in a way that doesn't require staring at the image. Describe the important parts in the commentary. Honestly listening to someone describe the angle of the cat's head and stuff isn't actually that interesting at least it wasn't to me during my brief episode of needing to use a screen reader.

I was so grateful the opthalmologist treated the issue after only about a month of this because wow I was miserable.

Mastodon is often wrong :) Lots of people who aren't advocating for themselves or people they know just repeating things they heard.

I actually have a very storied personal medical history with Sight Issues I won't get into all the details of, but there was one incident of my Sight Issues manifesting that made me very passionate about this topic.

In my senior year of college I developed this new fun vision problem where by the late afternoon I just couldn't use my eyes anymore due to extreme pain, and I had a blind friend who was like "use a screen reader! here is how I do things" and basically taught me how to be a part-time blind person until I could see an ophthalmologist, and we bonded over how awful web accessibility is and how hard it is to use screen readers and how like, at the time, the android screen reader was literally unusable because the mandatory tutorial was broken. This lasted about a month before I got treatment.

It led me to incorporate web accessibility into my senior project, and doing a lot of research into accessible web design, and my passion about this is why I originally got involved with Mastodon development, I was making accessibility tweaks to make it better for people with sight disabilities and to work better with screen readers. This led to more web accessibility research and some involvement with WCAG.

And in library school we had a mandatory technology class where we had an entire module on WCAG.

And yeah it drives me crazy seeing people who don't use screen readers and have never used one demanding long fun eloquent passages of novels when all I fucking wanted when I was part-time blind was things to just say "cat dot jpeg" so I could move on.

https://wcag.com/blog/good-alt-text-bad-alt-text-making-your-content-perceivable/

It sucks too because if they knew they're just supposed to be concise and brief it would be much less work for them and they wouldn't feel like it's too hard to do but people who don't understand what good alt text is keep telling people to be long with it which is bad for actually getting it

When quoting a book or something, the best practice is simply don't use an image at all. Just use the ">" markdown indicator and put the text in the post body as text.

If for some reason you must have a picture, then identify only what is unique information in the picture. Something like "Illustrated page from Winnie the Pooh featuring Pooh and Piglet under a tree. Text transcription below"