Chapotraphouse

Hello. I'm a visual artist interested in incorporating alt-text into my work and making it more accessible for people.

I am not against mandatory requirement for it, but here are my main struggles with it:

• Lack of a clear, easy to follow and objective guidelines for how to compose alt-text.

Once these directives have been established that also takes care of low-effort or wrongly applied alt-text, avoids there being favoritism in moderation process and served to educate us.

I understand your frustration with me and that is justifiable, but please help me be better. For instance this is a piece of art I made When I was uploading it I had spent a couple hours trying to figure out how to make appropriate text for it, before I made the cowardly choice to opt out completely when I became overwhelmed by information. At the same time a short alt-text for an artwork like this feels inappropriate. That made me choose to out out of including any, seeing as it is optional and I don't deserve the attention of anyone who would have otherwise engaged with my work when I am unwilling/unable to provide adequate alt-text for them.

I am not looking for excuses, but rather would like for us to work together and figure out a solution.

I have tried to write alt text for images but am discouraged by a) how difficult it is to adequately convey the point of an image, and b) then knowing few if any people will see it.

Things that make alt text more likely to happen:

• Alt text should be visible to everyone. Maybe it could go over-top of the blurred images. Or something.
• When you add an image via the toolbar button or paste into edit box, it should have placeholder alt text like "Image description here"; but that placeholder should get stripped out if it is not edited by the user, to avoid meaningless default alt
• the markdown Help page that you can get by pressing the (?) button on the far right of the editing toolbar (in default web layout) should describe the use of alt text
• images that are grabbed automatically when posting a URL should include alt text if available. For example this recent post contains a banner image, pulled from the original page. On hexbear, the proxied image has no alt, but on the original page, if you right-click and use "Inspect" you see alt="A row of teenagers all using their phones."

Images are a terrible medium for online communication

that's a silly thing to say. even the alt text you provided for your own screenshot is way less good at conveying the intended message than the screenshot itself. By looking at the image I can instantly know how to add alt text when uploading an image as a post. But reading the alt text gives a hint, at best.

I've tried before to find guides about how to write alt text but never found anything that suits this kind of environment. It's straight forward if you are talking about interface elements etc but hardly a trivial request when it comes to creative stuff, jokes, or images where inferences are supposed to be made.

Alt text can also be added to inline images. Per the commonmark spec: ![alt] (/url "title")

See also https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-write-an-image-description-2f30d3bf5546 from the disabled comm sidebar.

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I'm guilty of not always providing alt text. But JSYK posting images doesn't require downloading them and uploading them from my file system. Users can just paste an image from their clipboards into the upload box or comment box and it will automatically host it on Hexbear and insert the link.

If we're stickying this thread why don't we just make it a mandatory field in submissions? Just remove the optional, maybe change "optional" to a link to a help thread showing best practices for image description in this field.

Also this actually seems like a real world use-case for AI, an app that uses AI to create descriptions for images for those with sight disabilities as and when required. The kind of genuinely positive use-case the technology ought to be implemented for. (disclaimer, i have not checked whether any of the AIs are actually good at this)

Is there a way to alt text when you post an image in a reply?

EDIT: Did it work?

I'm personally not dependent on alt-texts but I'm checking every single image you all post on here, quietly judging you for the absence of alt-texts and relishing their presence.

I wish that alt text were easier to see. By default, there’s no indication that there’s alt text set for this image, and at least in the browser I’m currently using, there’s no easy way to copy the alt text.

I didn't know we could do this and will do it from now on

I usually try to do this now due to accessibility concerns. As @Edie@hexbear.net said, when embedding an image in a comment, the alt text goes inside the [].

didn't even realize alt text was a thing on this site tbh, i have no idea how i would go about seeing it if i wanted to

I've always tried to use alt-text when possible, but for inline images I've been confused about whether to put the description between the brackets or in quotes in the parentheses. If this thread is anything to go off of, I guess I should do both, or?

There's also the thing about how to write good descriptions. I'll have to take a good look through the guide that Edie linked in this thread; I skimmed through it just now and it's got some good advice.

In a sense it almost feels "easier" to write AD for a video than for a still image, because with video you generally have a hard limit for how long your description can be — just however long the space is between dialog — and you also oftentimes have less you have to describe if the sound design does it for you. But when you're describing an image, you can just go on and on and on and on and on however long you find reasonable for the target audience. And so I often do.

You are completely correct, though I must admit to my own failings when it comes to alt text description.

Image descriptions are useful to me, sometimes I don't understand the context of the image being used in relation to the post. I write alt text for a multitude of reasons!

Monkeys paw, every image gets "Pig with Poop on its Balls" as the alt text

Note: Why is is that this image has alt text (check the source), but when I long click it on mobile I only get the URL?

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.

100% agree on this. This also strikes me as something that AI would actually be good at. I’d be shocked if there aren’t screen readers or other software that have an LLM built in to describe images and answer questions about them or software at least working towards that. Obviously it may not always be perfect and bespoke alt text is going to be better since the LLM might not get the gist of certain memes etc but yeah seems like a tailor made use case as opposed to the current shoehorning of AI into nearly everything without any real thought so that half the internet becomes pure slop..

Mods, could we make that fireld mandatory?

I love this; can mobile app users get a pass until dessalines/whoever gets a patch in place that lets us add the alt text?