The history of alt text goes back to 1993. The alt attribute was introduced for HTML 1.2 to be used for text-based browsers, which load faster by not loading most of the graphic content.
This was a big deal when bandwidth connections were super limited.
This is because graphics require more bandwidth to load quickly due to being larger files (compare a .txt file with a .jpg file).
Folks who remember using the internet in the '90s might also have intentionally forgotten "lag" and images that took forever to load if they loaded at all.
Thus, the alt attribute was created to provide alternate access to the relevant content of graphics that users might not see, for whatever reason, so they can still use a site or page.
The alt attribute accepts text input (thus, "alt text") and displays for sighted users in the place of an image.
In 1999, with HTML 4.1, the alt attribute became required for img and area tags.
Even though this is a really old standard at this point, with lots of documented best practice, I personally took many, many web dev classes through 2015 and none of them ever taught me about the alt attribute.
This might go some way to explaining how even people who are professionals at creating websites and web content generally know and understand very little about alt text and other web accessibility (#a11y) best practices.
It tends to be seen as an optional and very limited specialty.
As I say, there's a lot of documentation on best practice for alt text and that documentation is especially very helpful if you're creating a traditional website.
It is not, unfortunately, written for social media (even the social media guide I've seen assumes access to a traditional website).
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.
It kinda pisses me off that even with that, blind web devs have such a hard time finding employment :')
Even more so if we have other issues going on that make marketing ourselves difficult.
It's soul crushing :') esp when so much shit could be easily dealt with working form the basics.
The amount of sites I've encountered that the dev had to have gone out of their way to fuck up every single thing and make it 10x more work because...? Idek. But.
Just. I s2fg people are jumping into frameworks, not learning the basics, and fucking shit up because they don't know the foundations.
I dunno how a lot of "professionals" would play this but if you diagnose your code w/ Lighthouse you'll see alt text and ARIA tags aren't optional for a good score. The challenge becomes getting good descriptions in the images as typically say a CMS with a staff doesn't feature additional alt field.
So typically the alt text and the ARIA tags get harvested from the article headline and a lot of times it passes but it's not exactly descriptive of the image itself.
Yes! I spent a lot of time online at the library in the early 90s, and I vividly remember *not being aware* that the websites I visited had graphics and color until the library got new computers. (I feel like this was a setting rather than images just never loading.)
Good lord I forgot about bitmaps. I went with JPG over TIFF because JPG was released in 1992 and probably more familiar to most people.
But yeah ffs bitmaps.
It's almost a reverse curb cut and then reversed again. I'm (mostly) sighted (for now) but I'm also Autistic and I check alt text for image comprehension reasons often. Not having to go into the dev tools to read alt text on social media is great.
Yeah, things like how it can be done with the button for sighted users makes things faster on that front 😋
Autism, ADHD, ESL, people with language comprehension issues... Theres a lot of good use for it.
And given not everyone has or can use a SR (or need to), the button makes it easier for them.
oh i still remember and i also hate how every website now goes "ah yes images no longer take up all of the bandwidth for the next hour or so time for video(and for some godawful reason random livestreams) to now eat every last bit of it websites should take hours to load dammit"
