Bree Lundberg ✨: Every time I post about alt text someone will say “but I don’t know how to write descriptions well?!” and I’m honestly tired sharing resources and examples when you could look it up for yourself. Or simply look through my images for examples. I promise trying is better than doing nothing at all.

For Disability Pride Month I’m once again begging for more artists to start considering accessibility and add alt text to your images. It helps low/no vision folks, neurodivergent folks, and more. Plus alt text shows up in searches! There’s a toggle in settings so you won’t forget. 👇

Every time I post about alt text someone will say “but I don’t know how to write descriptions well?!” and I’m honestly tired sharing resources and examples when you could look it up for yourself. Or simply look through my images for examples. I promise trying is better than doing nothing at all.

Here is a really good example/guide on writing alt-text that's been going around :)

Thank you! I didn’t have the energy to find that image again haha

Luckily since alt-text is searchable (a great reason to use alt-text!) it was easy to find. I just searched "alt text capybara" 😄

(and YW! No prob ☺️)

Good!! So many times the at text has helped me find memes or certain images again because I’ll remember only one or two key words or subject matter.

Yes!! Alt-text FTW 🙌

This is so helpful!

I'm glad to hear it! Share widely :)

This is really helpful actually! Now I just need to get over the the anxiety attack I have having to articulate what my own art is haha

I'm glad to hear it! I'm sure that you'll feel more confident describing your own art with practice and time :)

Yeah it is important to me that my art is accessible it's just weirdly overwhelming haha! This is gonna help a ton tho ^^

Thanks for sharing, I've never seen this before! Will be thinking about the cute capybara when I next write alt text. 🤭

Was just going to ask…thank you.

This is so helpful, thank you so much for sharing!🙏

YW!

I've got some good prompt questions:

Alt text prompt Qs: What would someone who can't see the image need to know about it in order to take part in the conversation? What is it about this image that made you choose it? What are the important details someone who could see the image would take away from it? (Not for images of text.)

And a thread with the history of alt text and how to think about it:

One thing that can help is understanding the goal of alt text—it's not image description. I can't find @hannah.the-void.social's exact phrasing, but she says something like the purpose of alt text on social media being to enable people who need alt text to be full participants in the conversation.

Also here's a pretty good guide to doing alt text specifically for art:

Here's my attempt at a guide to writing effective alt and descriptive text for art work on Bluesky. I'll be posting bits of it here as a thread as well for easy sharing. I'm also open to critique and suggestions, so feel free to comment or ask questions! 📌

An attempted guide to writing effective alt and descriptive text for art.mannequinrentals.help An attempted guide to writing effective alt and descriptive text for works of art on Bluesky.

Great info/resources, thank you!

Yup. It's not enough for us to tell people "do alt text!" and not help them know best practice that's been developed over decades. Some people don't even know alt text is decades old. I wrote the history thread because someone who thought it was only a year or two old asked me to.

Yep! I did not have the spoons to gather info/resources this time so I appreciate you and others posting the extra help. Great to learn the history of it as well.

That's interesting. The most surprising (to me) comment I've received is "if people can't see, how are they going to read social media/the image description" Some people just hadn't heard of screenreaders or tts, which surprised me.

Thank you for this! The photos I post are more than just functional images so this will be very useful in refining my image description practices.

My sister and I used to have a game where one of us would draw something then describe it to the other who would try to draw it too! Then we would compare! We didn’t realize I was training for alt text! Haha!

Oh that’s fun!!

Gartic Phone is all about this!

I’ve seen people say, “describe the image the way you would to a friend who isn’t looking at the picture with you.” :) also fun trick for people writing the alt text, make a note or document to hold any alt text for an image that you may post multiple times! 🙏🏻💜🩷

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