Rachel StantzJan 4, 2023

In a couple of different places on Mastodon this week I’ve seen people saying something to the effect of “what does visible alt text matter, it’s for screen readers.”

Here are just a few scenarios why people might want to view alt text visually:

1. “I made the post and I want to double check the alt text I wrote.”
2. “I did not make the post but I want to learn how other people write alt text so I can write better descriptions.”
3. “I’m having trouble making sense of the image but I think a written description would help.”
4. “My vision is enough to read text at my preferred font size but not in a tiny screenshot with jpeg compression.”
5. “This is what works best for me because of reasons I don’t want to get into.”

Accessibility is for everyone. Try not to make assumptions.

Show threadKaterina MarchánJan 4, 2023
@arjache I think it's understated how much rich context can be added in alt text too, tbh, which can directly benefit everyone. xkcd obviously took this too far by not actually describing the images themselves, but there's something in between that enriches us all!
Show threadRichard BarrellJan 6, 2023

@zkat @arjache xkcd has both title set to the joke text *and* he also sets alt. Alas he sets alt to just the title of the comic, not a description of it.

it's unfortunately confusing that the thing people *call* the "alt text" on webcomics is actually the title attribute, not the alt.

explainxkcd has people writing decent image descriptions for xkcd strips.

I think oglaf's author sets both alt= and title= to 2 different jokes on each strip. I've know of no other comic putting jokes in both.

Show threadRichard BarrellJan 6, 2023
@zkat @arjache Also shout out to https://white-noise-comic.com for being one of extremely few comics I've seen actually take visual accessibility seriously. I can't remember if there's alt text on the img tag itself but the author posts prose that matches the contents of the image under every strip. For the purpose of practical accessibility for a webcomic this is IME way better than using the alt attribute.
White Noise - Free Palestine.

Show threadRichard Barrell
@zkat @arjache a couple reasons I like that White Noise has a separate transcription not in an alt attribute. One is it's visible to everybody, including people who don't have assistive tech set up. Another is it has paragraphs in it, which I don't think you can do in an alt attribute because that's just a string.
Jan 6, 2023 at 2:14amWeb
Show threadRachel StantzJan 6, 2023
@0x2ba22e11 @zkat yeah, way back when I was doing web comics, I made a point of including well formatted transcriptions where you click Show Transcript and they showed up inline on the page. As you note, it was much easier to format properly that way than an alt tag. But it meant I was always maintaining my own comic software because nothing else supported it. Oh No Robot provides a similar service but it’s more focused around indexing.
Show threadjust adrienneJan 7, 2023
@0x2ba22e11 @zkat @arjache If the description is long, people should really be using the "longdesc" attribute and describing the text in markup somewhere instead (longdesc takes a URI, which can be on the same page or on a different page)
Show threadjust adrienneJan 7, 2023
@0x2ba22e11 @zkat @arjache (not applicable to Mastodon, obviously, but relevant to the digression into webcomics.)