how do you ... write alt text ...
- anon who needs to write alt text but is STRUGGLING
HELLO so this ask has been languishing in my inbox for an entire half a year. i am so sorry. hopefully this gets to you.
there is kind of a learning curve but in general my advice is don't overcomplicate it and just think about what in the image is important! some people say descriptions are like how you would explain an image quickly to your friend over the phone. personally i think of them kind of like translations, in the sense that the context matters for how i write it.
for example: when i write alt text for a manga panel,
this is honestly a really lazy example, if i were trying to write a properly good description i wouldn't use script format, but if you look at the alt you will notice a few things:
there isn't an [id: blah blah /end id] framing. this is because screen readers will read out "image:" before starting the alt text, so people who use them know it's an image description and there's no need to clarify, unlike if you're adding a description in the body text, in which case people usually do add some kind of frame.
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i always start out with "death note manga panel" - similarly i usually start descriptions of fanart with "death note art" - this is so people can get a broad view of what the image is in general and if they're not interested (e.g. someone who just got dn art on their dash from a beloved mutual but isn't into the show) they can skip past quickly
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i don't describe who light and ryuk are, such as "light yagami is a brown-haired pale-skinned japanese boy drawn in monochrome wearing a school uniform and carrying a school bag," for several reasons: 1. if you are reading/listening to a death note post you almost certainly know who these people are. the rest of the post assumes familiarity with the characters anyway, so there's no reason for the alt text specifically to treat them like strangers. 2. light's outfit is just not relevant to the point of the post!
if you check out the alt text on the original post you will notice i also added the clarification "official english translation" there because i'm comparing the japanese and english versions of the manga so that's important in the context of the post. someone who can see the image clearly can tell that's the general look of the viz translation whereas someone who can't won't be able to tell if it's one of the prominent fanslations or something.
anyway the process for describing fanart is pretty similar - i can't find an immediate example right now so i'll make one up based on an image that was stuck in my head earlier
[death note art of mello lying on a giant chessboard, surrounded by similar-looking mangled crash test dummies. he stares up tiredly at the camera.]
i don't think his outfit is important here because, first of all, it has no symbolic meaning to the fanart, and second, a blind/low-vision person generally has no reason to care about the visual of someone's outfit lmao. what you want to do is translate the emotional impact of the image instead of getting bogged down in the visual details.
oh and one last thing: remember people reading image descriptions are also experiencing the whole post at once, the same way you are. sometimes i see fanart where the artist includes different color variants and then rewrites the whole description for each variant. you don't need to do that!! just describe the first one and go [the same image but tinted red] [the same image but tinted blue] etc. your alts are in context of the post, not a separate independent thing you need to tack onto each image.
i hope that makes sense and is helpful!!! i apologize if it sounds overwhelming lmao like ultimately please don't stress it. any description is better than no description and if you start doing it you will get better naturally!
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