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.
I have a favorite guide (webaim.org/techniques/a...) that does a great job at making clear the importance of context in writing alt text, but not all parts of it perfectly translate to social media.
The first difference is that images on social media are often about emotive content (vibes). When you're writing alt text for such an image, it's a good idea to try and convey the feeling with evocative language.
A second difference is that traditional alt text guides will just tell you not to include images of text, but these are ubiquitous on social media and aren't going anywhere, which is fine in itself.
The problem is there aren't quick-and-easy guides to point people to on this. Yet. (I have ideas.)
A third difference is the idea of leaving alt text for "decorative images" blank.
I would not do this on social media. On social media, a user needing alt text doesn't necessarily know if the alt text is missing because the image is decorative or because you're a jerk.
Writing a description of where to start with good alt text that fits in a tweet I came up with and validated with Blind folks:
"What about the image is needed to welcome and include visually impaired people in the conversation"
I think that fits here too
(no shame to the person I'm replying to)
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.
Jsx is awesome!
It doesn't replace foundation knowledge of html.
I refuse to say css-in-js is awesome lmao. Or shit like tailwind and bootstrap. Cause I have such a burning hatred for all of it and have since college.
But it's popular AF. And people don't learn basic ass css bc of it :')
For that matter, they know how to do shit in react or vue or whatever other framework
But don't know how to do shit in JS.
So you get people asking "how do you do x" and it's basic things from JS but it's been extrapolated so heavily they never learned.
Which also makes learning new frameworks-
A nightmare that takes so much longer.
But "I know x, I don't need to know [foundations]" 🙄
Shit has changed so much since I was in college. And v much for the worst.
I get that frameworks make shit faster to do on large projects and make one more employable but like...
Not knowing the basics a makes you a liability and replaceable :')
And people refuse to listen to that. It's mind numbing.
There's so much cool shit but no one knows it because they didn't have to learn. And it fucks over disabled people. And we get tasked with fixing shit like bsky because "oh-
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.
