The internet has become 3 massive multi-user blogs, each largely consisting of screenshots taken of the other two. This kind of blows, and not just for the usual reasons that may spring to mind.

Images are a terrible medium for online communication! Not everyone online uses a monitor. Any messages contained in a picture is straight up unacceptable without alt-text. It also makes it harder to find and fact check sources, or to spread a thought or idea further than yet another image upload. Copy/pasting text is just plain easier than downloading and uploading.

If you're going through the trouble of creating an image post, take an extra minuite to copy/past (or even transcribe) the source text into the alt-text submission. It's not much, but it goes a ways to improving how we use this blasted network!

https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-write-an-image-description-2f30d3bf5546

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[–] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago

I keep forgetting to set the actual alt-text, so I appreciate the reminder—I'll try to do better going forward. I always try to provide an image description inside a spoiler tag in the post/comment (example). This blog post (shared by @Edie@hexbear.net previously as well as in this thread) actually says

Most social media platforms these days offer an alt text option. From what I have heard from the community, it’s actually better to put the description in the caption instead. This way, it’s also visible to screen magnifier users and sighted people who might need or benefit from the description. (It’s actually unclear to me whether we should also add a full description or abbreviated version in the alt tag if we are adding to the caption. If you have thoughts or ideas about this, please reach out! Contact info at the bottom).

The secondary benefit of this approach is that it also allows for copy-pasting so that people can easily quote/re-share the content of a text post.

One thing I'm unsure about is how accessible spoiler tags are. Is it straightforward for someone using a screenreader to identify that the spoiler tag is there and expand it? I use spoiler tags just to take up less space, but if it's an accessibility issue I'd much rather people have to scroll a bit more if the spoiler tag is a significant complication for the people who need the description the most.