Mastodon•ART 🎨 CuratorJun 13, 2023

The fediverse has a huge community of blind and partially sighted users, as well as people accessing the internet from bad or limited connections that don't load images. Alt-text helps everyone.

*Please* make an effort with it. If you're on .art especially, we expect you to be either adding alt-text or using one of the many options available to ask for help with it, which can be as simple as adding an emoji to your post.

https://mastodon.art/@Curator/109279035107793247

Mastodon•ART 🎨 Curator (@[email protected])

We have a lot of blind and partially sighted users on the fediverse. Accessibility is important here, and as such, it's good form to include image descriptions (alt text) when we add media to our posts. When someone uses a screenreader to read the timeline, and the screenreader comes to an image with no alt text, it just says 'image' (as far as I know). That's boring, unhelpful, and provides no clue as to what the image actually *is*. This differs slightly depending on how you're using (cont)

Mastodon.ART
Show threadOblomovJun 13, 2023
@Curator BTW I'll add to that that alt text helps also sighted people, especially if done right: it helps when media fails to load due to federation issues or low bandwidth in the client side, it helps identify people and environments the reader may be unfamiliar with, and obviously it helps with the legibility of text in screenshots.
Show threadAndrew C.A. Elliott

@oblomov @Curator
Other reasons for alt-text.

* To explain the significance of the image to someone who might not be familiar with the subject matter. (Or even ... To explain the joke)

* For the image maker to articulate to THEMSELVES why the image is worth sharing ('why do I like this so much'), and a little exercise in self expression and creative writing.

All in all a thoroughly good thing (IMO) 

Jun 13, 2023 at 7:16pmWeb
Show threadIan TindaleJun 13, 2023

@ACAElliott @oblomov @Curator what I’d really like to see is alt text that explains a joke in a way that doesn’t dismantle the joke to death

Another thing I’d like to see is alt text that can be translated, and this I think would be a pivotal feature – I often see cartoons which I’d love to read except they’re in a foreign language

If the cartoon text at least was in alt text, and translatable, it’d give cartoons a worldwider audience, and if there was some way that the text of the cartoon was in some clever way actually the alt text ie it didn’t ‘pop up’ to appear, it was real text in the cartoon bubbles, that could be read out by screen readers, and also translated live into whatever language (and still somehow fit in the word bubbles), that would be superb

Show threadIan TindaleJun 14, 2023

@ACAElliott @oblomov @Curator I’ve had a thought – both the examples here (how to properly explain a joke without destroying it’s jokiness and also how to alt-text the cartoon speech bubbles) are kind of related to the script of the thing before it becomes a joke meme or a cartoon layout

If there were a sort of ‘way’ of relaying a script for a joke meme or joke image, it’d also be viable as a methodology for annotating the speech bubbles of a cartoon

Obviously it’d usually be retro-derived, because the joke image already exists and was never formally scripted out in the first place, it ‘just happened’, and in the case of the multi-panel cartoon, it might not have been scripted in that format initially, the scripting would’ve been to annotate the pictures only and the text came later, or something like that – so this script format of alt-text would be kind of faked by going back after the final product and pretending that the script was one of the initial stages of development of it

Anyway, it should be dead simple or people won’t bother – if a fun way of back-deriving a ‘script’ could be arrived at, and make it forgiving and lossy but effective enough, that’d come across as a best-practice for how to annotate visual humour everywhere else, and if this is borne in mind from the beginning of new visual works (even in a lightweight way) it might help in terms of comedic structure in the first place, so artists, authors, meme-makers would want to use this ‘script’ way of thinking because it’s good