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What are image descriptions and why are they important?

Image Descriptions text following a picture explaining what’s in that picture. They are primarily for blind/visually impaired people with screen readers and visually impaired people who can read text but have issues with pictures.

They also help people who have trouble:

focusing on/understanding a picture

reading text on images (ex low contrast, weird fonts, etc)

getting images to load

Without image descriptions posts are not accessible to many people 

How to make image descriptions in general

Do something to indicate you are starting a description

That way people know you’re describing the image and not commenting on it.

Describe the image

You want to be concise but also include all relevant details. 

Indicate you’re ending the image description

That way people know that whatever is next is commentary etc and not part of the image description

I learned from example, so here are lots of examples to look at (it’s basically all the descriptions I reblog but didn’t make, so there’s a whole lot of different styles. 

I am in the process of making a guide specific to tweets and tumblr tags/replies/posts that I will link on this post when they’re done I’m just very disabled. 

Things not to do a

Bold, underline, or italicize words; use small text, all caps, fancy colors, fancy fonts

This makes it difficult for many people who need image descriptions to read them

In addition, all caps and gradient text tend to make screen readers say one letter at a time instead of reading out the words

Correct misspellings or grammar mistakes

We want to be as accurate to the image as possible. 

If the spelling mistake is to the point a screen reader wouldn’t be able to read it, I recommend putting the actual word next to it. 

If there’s just a wall of text, you can add paragraph breaks, commas or periods, etc, just put a note saying what you added 

Sensor curse words etc 

This is probably the question I get asked the most. And I’m glad, because it means people are starting to think critically about how they share content on the internet, and they’re wanting to do better. That’s awesome! I’m super grateful for the opportunity to educate more folks about this.

I have a secret, though: there isn’t a secret to writing good image descriptions.

Here’s a guide on how to write image descriptions and alt text. You can also check out my how to ID tag for guides and other tips and tricks. There are many approaches to writing image descriptions, which is why I think checking out multiple guides is useful.

But I wanna stress: you don’t have to write image descriptions just like someone else. There isn’t a secret formula or code. How I write image descriptions isn’t going to be exactly how someone else does it, especially when describing something subjective like art.

And I want to make another point: ANY image description is better than none. Literally. If you share an image and just write “a photo of a family reunion at the park,” that’s providing information that was not there before. You are making that image more accessible!

Here are my tips for describing fan art specifically:

I start with what I typically notice first about the image. That usually means that I write things in about this order: Character ID, hair/skin color, pose, clothing, background. This varies, of course.

Because it’s art, sometimes it’s useful to describe the lighting and mood of the piece. Is it dark? Illuminated by a single light source? What’s the tone of the piece (both the literal color and the feeling)? Is it referencing another visual work, like a scene from a movie or another famous art piece? Is it bright and colorful or dreary and moody? These are all good things to mention, if you feel so inclined.

Some people like to go into extreme detail when writing image descriptions. Some keep them very brief and to the point. I fall somewhere in between, but I do try not to get too bogged down in the details (for my own sake, honestly).

And, Tumblr-specific points:

Add the image description directly beneath the image in the main text portion of the post, before any commentary (if you’re the original artist). Add it in the text portion before your own commentary if you’re reblogging. That way, your commentary will make sense to someone using a screen reader.

Don’t hide the description under a read more link. Simply because…well, imagine if that was how Tumblr worked for sighted people, and you had to click through to people’s individual blogs while scrolling through your dash to see any images. That’d suck, right?

Accessibility should be built into your posts from the start. So don’t post an image, then reblog it from yourself with a description. Put the description in the original post so that there’s just one accessible version of the image floating around.

Let me know if you have any questions that I didn’t cover here! I’m not an expert on image descriptions and I hope I don’t come across as one. I’m just a person trying to do their best in this cold, inaccessible world. 

One of the most profound things I read in my original journey to ADHD diagnosis was what Dr. Ned Hallowell calls “the cough drop sign” in the book, Driven To Distraction. I’d never felt more seen before reading this quote. It comes from one of Hallowell’s ADHD patients: “Someone left [a cough drop] on the dashboard of our car. The other day I saw the cough drop and thought, I’ll have to throw that away. When I arrived at my first stop, I forgot to take the cough drop to a trash can. When I got back into the car, I saw it and thought, I’ll throw it away at the gas station. The gas station came and went and I hadn’t thrown the cough drop away. Well, the whole day went like that, the cough drop still sitting on the dashboard. When I got home, I thought, I’ll take it inside with me and throw it out. In the time it took me to open the car door, I forgot about the cough drop. It was there to greet me when I got into the car the next morning, Jeff was with me. I looked at the cough drop and burst into tears. Jeff asked me why I was crying, and I told him it was because of the cough drop. He thought I was losing my mind. ‘But you don’t understand,’ I said, ‘my whole life is like that. I see something that I mean to do and then I don’t do it. It’s not only trivial things like the cough drop; it’s big things, too.’”

they put you in a horrible situation, which they define as not violence, they wait for you to lash out, they define that as violence (and say you started it), and then they strike back harder with a more oppressive status quo, which they'll define as consequences of your violent behavior.

part of fighting this is acknowledging that first step, that the status quo is inherently (if passively) violent. accordingly, you are going to see people asserting that things you think of as normal are kinds of violence.

if you want to fight oppression, it is PIVOTAL that you curb any reactionary tendencies you have and listen to people when they tell you that the status quo is violence.

you meet someone who has been discriminated out of access to familial support, housing, means to afford food, healthcare, etc. all because of her status as a disabled trans woman. she's surviving off donations. the platform she's begging on bans her account as a purge of trans women. she tells you they're trying to kill her. you tell her that banning accounts isn't the same as killing people, and that it's not a type of violence, and doesn't she know some people are subject to real violence? what a freak, she seriously thinks banning her tumblr account for ban evasion is violence, the same as an attempt on her life! when she starves to death that winter, you don't hear about it. it's not like she was posting about it, after all; she kept getting banned, which is fine, because you know that's not violence.

if you go around telling people that parts of the status quo are not violent because they don't look like the societally agreed definition of violence, you are serving the interests of oppressors. this does mean that if a person in a wheelchair tells you that having the accessible routes around your workplace be incredibly inconvenient is a type of violence, you have to take them seriously. if a black person tells you that the system of inheriting money from parents is racist and a form of violence, you have to listen. if a trans woman tells you that #transmisogyny being a blocked tag on tumblr is epistemic violence, you owe it to her to hear her out and to try seriously to understand.

and if you don't get it? or if she's not up to explain it? you should be very very careful about stating that she must be wrong. because if you say she's wrong, you're saying that the status quo isn't violent, and that any suffering it inflicts on her or others in her demographic is morally neutral and entirely justified, because you don't see it, or don't consider it violence.

GIRL THE EGG COLUMN IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. YOU DO NOT NEED CONVINCING YOU NEED CONVICTION.

IS REASON ENOUGH. BE A

GIRL TODAY RIGHT NOW

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.

Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.

Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).

Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.

Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)

“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.

The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.

informative post i made for instagram regarding the catastrophic earthquakes here in my country but i thought i'd share it here too

🆘🆘🆘PLEASE REBLOG IF YOU CAN'T DONATE!!! we are DESPERATELY trying to get more people to talk about this!!

e.g. if you are seriously having such bad joint or back pain in your 30s that it hampers your day to day activities, you need to take that seriously. that is not 'just ageing', that's potentially an indicator of an underlying condition, unaddressed injury (which is quite common but will get worse if you don't notice and take care of it) or daily habits (poor posture, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle) causing cumulative damage to your body.