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.
if you have ever cared enough to comment on accessibility read this shit.
seriously.
read it.
a single key on a piano is played, producing a sound. what does that sound mean?
to a musician, it's a middle c note.
to a physicist, it's a collection of compression waves with a fundamental frequency of roughly 261.63Hz.
to a spectator at a concert, it's the beginning of their favourite song.
it's all the same sound. but it's meaning depends on the context we interpret it in. that meaning is useful to understanding things in that context - and not necessarily in others. a musician doesn't care about the exact frequency of a middle c note, for example - they care that it's a middle c, and how to play that on their instrument, and how to use it in a chord or where it fits in a musical scale. if you tried to ask a musician to play a ~261Hz note, you'd likely get back blank stares and confusion. the frequency of a note isn't useful to a musician. sure, that is the frequency of the note you want, but in the context the musician cares about, that doesn't mean anything. it doesn't tell them how to play the note, like "middle c" does. it just tells them something that isn't important to them, something meaningless to them. and that's all to say nothing of the spectator, who doesn't get anything out of notes or frequencies - they just want to know what song is being played.
images contain a lot of visual information. we've all heard the saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words". but when we share images with one another, the ideas, thoughts and meaning we're trying to share is rarely so complex that it would take the full "thousand words" to convey. there's parts of the image that, within the context of a conversation, carry important information. and there's parts that are just background noise, that don't mean anything important. if you want to show your friend a picture of a dog for example, the colour of the floor the dog is sitting on isn't very important. the dog is what you're trying to communicate, not the floor.
you could write paragraphs of precise, detailed transcription of an image. and that would convey anything anyone could possibly want to know about that image. but that's almost never what you're trying to do when you send someone an image. so why do that in your alt text? alt text isn't about describing every last detail of an image to vision-impaired users - it's about ensuring vision-impaired users can understand the same information you're communicating to sighted users. you're taking the information you're communicating visually, and translating it to a textual representation, so a screen reader can read it as spoken word. you don't ask "what is in this image", you ask "what am i communicating with this image". your image and your alt text are supposed to be interchangeable with each other, so their meaning needs to align. it's taking the sound of the piano, and explaining it as a middle c to the musician, and a ~261Hz tone to the physicist - something that they understand in their individual contexts.
this, in my eyes, is the way to approach accessible design. taking a page designed for sighted people, and directly transcribing all of the visual information into a representation that vision-impaired people can understand is going to result in a representation that substitutes meaning for descriptions of things with varying levels of utility. "green check icon" isn't very useful when the idea you want to communicate with it is "success". instead, determine what it is you're trying to communicate, and translate that meaning to various representations, be they visual, textual, tactile - the representations that your audience can interact with and understand. that's how you design systems that everyone can interact with on equal footing - not with compatibility layers, but with translated interfaces, tailored to the processes and the mediums through which they interact with the world.
and again - absolutely, 100% go and read the article OP linked. it's a profoundly insightful article about the meaning of accessibility, about the ways in which deaf and blind people interact with the world, about how the mainstream concept of accessibility is alienating them, and so many other things i haven't even touched on in this post. what i've written down here is my own interpretations, my own takeaways from that article - partially to help reinforce the ideas in my own mind, partially in the hopes that others might find my interpretations useful and meaningful as well. but it's not the only interpretation - there's so many other angles to approach that article from. and i guarantee you'll come out of it with some meaningful interpretation of your own.
