Marcin Wichary4d ago

I’m curious: Did people/apps ever attempt to bundle alt text with the image as metadata? (Like EXIF?)

That feels like the right place to put it, so then it could be read by apps/browsers, and also travel with the image on save etc. Rather than specifying it as out-of-band text like we do today.

Show threadHugo Mills

@mwichary The answer I've seen before on this is that alt text is very much context-dependent.

For example, an alt text describing the relationships of the people in a 19th-century photo will probably miss everything about important about the historical clothing styles, or about the photographic process and how it affects the resultant image.

Apr 9 at 11:41amWeb
Show threadMarcin Wichary4d ago
@darkling Oh, interesting!
Show threadJanne Moren4d ago

@darkling @mwichary
Presumably you can just rewrite the alt text when you reuse the image, just like you would write a new alt text today if you need to.

The benefit here is that you would not lose the context of the earlier text the moment you copied the image.

Show threadDavid Cohen4d ago
@jannem @darkling @mwichary Except if the EXIF is stripped through processing. A lot of online processes do that (either inadvertently or deliberately).
Show threadMarcin Wichary4d ago
@jannem @darkling Yeah, I agree with this.
Show threadDan Burzo4d ago
@darkling Yes, that seems to be the main argument against collocating alt text with the image. Additionally, it sounds impractical when the image is used in a multilingual context. @mwichary
Show threadMarcin Wichary4d ago
@db @darkling Fonts have a capability to specify additional names/metadata per locale. I wonder if something like this could solve this problem.