When I write alt text, my approach is to ask "what information does this image convey to me, a sighted person?". If the post is a joke, the information is the context needed to get the joke. If the post is art, the information's what the reader must know to guess what feeling the art would convey.
I don't mention detail if it's detail a sighted person would overlook; if the post contains text, I only caption text I would read (IE don't caption the NYT header, say "an NYT page saying…").
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mcc
in reply to mcc • • •Minor rules I follow:
- Sometimes a joke is a sort of secret. Like, the "joke" hinges on you knowing without being told that the man in the photo is David Hasselhoff. If captioning helpfully would "ruin the joke" for sighted readers, I let the joke ruin.
- I was once told that CAPITAL LETTERS are often read by screen readers as acronyms. So, because alt text more than anything else is for the benefit of screen readers, I never use capitals as EMPHASIS, not even when captioning uppercase text.
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mcc
in reply to mcc • • •The correct way to caption/alt-text images is, of course, whatever it is that blind users say would be most useful. However I have read several statements by blind users on this subject, and they contradicted each other a little bit. So the above is the best synthesis position I've been able to find.
One thing I'd very much like to know is, when a screen reader encounters emoji, whether it is more likely to say the name of the emoji ("Face with Party Horn and Party Hat") or just skip it.
mcc
in reply to mcc • • •bituur esztreym reshared this.
CIMB4
in reply to mcc • • •mcc
in reply to CIMB4 • • •Leon
in reply to mcc • • •my understanding is that they say the name of the emoji; that's certainly the behaviour for macOS's TTS system anyway. i read a post once (attached) complaining about how irritating clapposting is on a screenreader and i did a deep dive.
my personal take is announcing the name of the emoji makes every message fucking hysterical, and I'd be totally down for a font that renders each emoji as its description, but I can see how it would get irritating if you lack the facility to skim
Howard Chu @ Symas
in reply to mcc • • •just stop using emoji.
Specifically for this topic, emoji are visual and you're writing alt-text for blind people, so they absolutely have no place there.
Dana Fried
in reply to mcc • • •if it's a meme image I call out the image or template, but then just provide the text (if any)
Ex:
"Guy in hotdog suit meme"
"Drake meme (anime):
Disapprove: ...
Approve: ..."
"Butterfly meme:
Butterfly: ...
Caption: Is this a ... ?"
Basically, assume they have the same grasp of pop culture as the rest of my audience and will "fill in" the rest of the details based on that.
Mark T. Tomczak
in reply to mcc • • •Bullet point 1 is extremely reasonable, especially because for sighted readers on every user-agent I know that most sighted readers use, the alt-text won't show anyway unless they ask for it.
If it "ruins the joke," it's acting as an explainer someone doesn't have to go search for, and that's gravy. I think we can class this as an example of "accessibility benefits the abled too."
Ted Mielczarek
in reply to mcc • • •Handler Skyler
in reply to mcc • • •