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.
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.)
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.
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!
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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.
Yeah! I think understanding the history (low/slow bandwidth, lag, text-only browsers, etc.) can help inform an approach to alt text that isn't overwhelming and open-ended but gives people a clear target to aim for.
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.
I guess it's been a while since Christopher Gorham's character was a blind CIA analyst in Covert Affairs? But also I think folks just... don't spend a lot of time wondering or trying to find answers to stray thoughts about these questions?
