[Plain Text: How to Write an Image Description: A Fundamental Guide. End PT]

General Guidelines:

[PT: General Guidelines. End PT]

Object, Action, Context

[PT: Object, action, context. End PT]

This is what you want to prioritize. What are we looking at, what is going on, and what is the surrounding environment?

Keep it simple and get to the point

[PT: Keep it simple and get to the point.]

Try to use short, clear sentences and prioritize what the reader needs to know in the context of the post. We don't need to know that the tweet was posted at 2:08AM or what color rings someone is wearing. That doesn't really provide useful information. If you really want to provide some relevant details, be sure you get to the main point of the image first.

Context is Important

[PT: Context is Important. End PT]

Why is the image posted there? What information does it lend to the content around it? Make sure the viewer knows what they need to know to understand how the image relates to the text and content partnered with it.

For a meme or a tweet screenshot, we don't need to know all the details or what the background looks like, we just need to understand the joke. For something like art or photography, you may want to include more details.

Don't Assume

[PT: Don't Assume. End PT]

Don't assume gender, race, and pronouns of the subject(s) of the image. If you can find this context in the post, on op's blog, or somewhere else you can include it, but try not to make baseless assumptions.

Alt Text vs Image Descriptions

[PT: Alt Text vs Image Descriptions. End PT]

Alt text is great for people using screen readers, but it isn't always the most accessible option. Alt text can be glitchy, the font size cannot be changed for those who need large text, and it doesn't show up at all until the image either loads or completely fails to load.

For this reason, a longer description in plain text in the body of the post is a more accessible option.

I suggest a short summary in the alt text so people can get the overview of an image and a longer description in the body of the post. For example, compare the image description and the alt text for the following image:

[Image ID: A guide to writing alt text on images. At the top, it says "Writing Alt Text" in big white text. It then lists off five major steps to writing alt text. Identify who, expression, description, color, and interesting features. It then shows an image of a capybara, with a sample alt text that reads, "A capybara looking relaxed in a hot spa. Yellow yuzu fruits are floating in the water, and one is balanced on top of the capybara's head." with each block of text color-coordinated to show which of the five steps it corresponds to. At the bottom of the image is the word "Puzzle" stylized into a logo. End ID.]

The Alt text provides the bare minimum of what you need to know to contextualize the image, while the ID expands on details that help to understand it and provides more details.

Formatting:

[PT: Formatting. End PT]

Try your best to use correct spelling and grammar, but transcribe accurately. Use clear language and concise sentences where possible. However: Don't censor words or correct spelling when transcribing something from the image. You want the description to be as accurate to the image as possible.

[PT: use correct spelling and grammar, but transcribe accurately. End PT]

Always use plain text. Never use formatting like bold, italics, other fonts/font sizes/text colors, or text in all caps. If they appear in the original image, transcribe it in plain text like this:

[Bold, underlined] Always use plain text. [End bold and underlines.]

Begin an ID with square brackets [[these]], followed by "ID:" or "Image:". End the description with "End ID" and a closed square bracket ] to signify the end of the descriptions.

Screenreaders and visually impaired people sometimes struggle with symbols and emojis. Transcribe these instead when possible!

[PT: Transcribe these instead when possible. End PT]

The image description should be directly after the image, before any post caption or commentary.

Never use a readmore! If you delete the post or change your url the description is gone forever. It also makes the ID harder to reach in general, which is not accessible.

[PT: Never use a readmore! End PT]

Make your post accessible from the start if you can. Don't post something without an ID then reblog it with a description so that people have a chance to spread the inaccessible version of the post if they "prefer" the one without the "clutter" of an ID. That's ableist. If you post something without a description then end up describing it later, edit the ID into the original post.

[PT: Make your post accessible from the start. End PT]

Resources:

[PT: Resources. End PT]

The People's Accessibility Discord Server: I will always suggest this server! It's full of people that can help write descriptions, give feedback on IDs you've written, answer questions about accessibility, and more!

Online OCR: Image(/PDF) to text converter! This is really helpful, especially for transcribing text in tweet screenshots, article excerpts, etc. You will still have to do a bit of work formatting and correcting things sometimes, but it's a really helpful tool

CaseConverter: Good for converting lots of text in all caps for plain text transcriptions.

Meme Image Descriptions: This google doc has descriptions of many common meme images and templates!

Some simple Image Description formats: tailored largely for replies and screenshots from social media.

WebAim: A whole website for web accessability!

Online Accessibility Masterpost focusing on image descriptions from tumblr user @anistarrose. This has a ton of good resources, reading, and tips!

Reading & Guidelines:

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Cooper Hewitt guidelines for image description: This focuses on describing art, but it's a fantastic resource. It gives a good description on the distinction between alt text and long descriptions and gives guidelines for each. It's a pretty concise and easily comprehensible read with a lot of good tips towards the end.

Medium's How to Write an Image Description: Concise and helpful. The origin of "object, action, context".

Diagram Center Guidelines for Image Description: I really suggest reading through this. It gives a much more comprehensive understanding of what is important when writing a description and has different sections for help describing all sorts of things like photos, art, comics, diagrams, charts, math, chemistry, and more! A longer read, but it has a lot of specifics.

Perkins School for the Blind how to write alt text and image descriptions: Another great resource! Concise and helpful, shorter than Diagram Center's articles.

SiteImprove's Alt Text Best Practices: Focuses on Alt text not long image descriptions

Last Call Media- Accessible Comics: Great info for describing comics!

American Anthropological Association's Guide for creating image descriptions: an additional resource on IDs just because

Some tips from Tumblr user @keplercryptids! I reiterated a lot of these points here, but it's still a very helpful post!

General guideline from @can-i-make-image-descriptions and @accessibleaesthetics

Alt Text and Image Description Guide by @brownandtrans

Huge list of blogs that post accessible content!

And another google doc of accessible blogs!

If this post was too much information to read and absorb all at once, I suggest reading the first two links as well as some of the last few links that lead to Tumblr posts.

[PT: If this post was too much information to read and absorb all at once, I suggest reading the first two links as well as some of the last few links that lead to Tumblr posts. End PT]

I've made a server to pair with this blog!

With the help of my absolutely wonderful partner it went from conception to operational in less than 12 hours 👏😁

Please join us in fostering a space for further discussion and celebration of accessibility, awareness, and resource sharing!

We have crowd sourcing channels for help with image descriptions and the like, as well as places to show off your accessibility experiences, and more!

Convertcase.net is your friend. Copy the caps locked text into it and it will let you convert it into many different styles automatically, including sentence case, where each letter at the start of a new sentence will be automatically capitalized.

You will have to go in an manually recapitalize the first letters of proper nouns but that's a lot easier than having to manually type the whole thing.

Hello! It’s totally okay to come to us with questions, we’re always happy to try and help!

To be completely honest this topic is something that a lot of us are still working on. The line between under and over-describing can be a bit hard to place, especially since it differs depending on the piece, and the person using the IDs. It’s impossible to make it perfect for everyone, but here are some tricks we’ve found helpful.

1) Ask yourself what the purpose of the piece is.

Art showing off a character design will have very different priorities than a comic or a meme. A drawing of a character just standing in a cool outfit suggests more in depth descriptions of their design whereas a long action filled comic should center the action or dialogue. Trying to describe characters and actions in the same part when a piece has multiple characters and/or significant action will often bog it down.

For example writing:

"X enters the room. They have blonde hair and pale freckled skin, and they wear a sweater vest over a white collared shirt and a pair of dangly cherry earrings. They are drawn from the waist up. They say to Y, 'What’s up?'"

doesn’t flow as well as writing:

“X enters the room and says to Y, 'What’s up?’”

Understanding the purpose of the piece often means being succinct for the sake of comedic timing, too. Putting the punchline of a comic in the middle of a paragraph of description makes it less impactful than saving it until the end, and breaking up dialogue with several sentences describing a background or outfit means people may lose the thread of the comic.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t describe the character design if you can find a way to significantly shorten the description or include it separately. We’ll go over one possible way of including them in the line breaks section.

2) When dealing with complex settings, backgrounds, or clusters of items, ask yourself what needs to be described individually, and what can be generalized.

Complex and/or cluttered surroundings can get incredibly wordy when describing each component as it’s own thing. If certain components are not individually important to the viewer’s understanding the piece, generalizing or sometimes even leaving them out can significantly cut down on words. For example, writing:

“A mahogany shelf sits above his head. On it sits a blue mug with a spoon sticking out, a ceramic container filled with utensils, and a set of salt and pepper shakers.”

is significantly wordier than writing:

“A shelf holding various utensils and kitchen items sits above his head.”

Sometimes you can bear to cut individual details entirely if they aren’t particularly relevant to understanding the image. For example, if describing a drawing of characters at the beach, and there’s a buoy in the ocean way out in the distance, you probably don’t need to describe it unless it plays an active role in the piece.

3) When describing the appearances of characters, keep in mind what features are important to understanding the artist’s depiction.

Certain aspects of a character’s appearance can say a lot about how the artist wants them to be interpreted. Things like body frame, hair and clothing style, and especially race can vary drastically by artist, and in result change how the character is understood.

Other things like eye color, nose shape, or specific body proportions often do not change the general understanding of the character, and can cause the character description to become bloated. They typically should not be included.

There are certainly exceptions to this however, for example, if a character has unnatural features like glowing eyes or a snout, it changes how the character is meant to be perceived and should be described.

4) Play around with line breaks.

Sometimes pieces are just too complex to avoid having a long description. In order to make sure all important details are included while also including action, consider breaking the description up into chunks. Putting the action first and then writing out the character designs allows the people who want to know what’s going on in the image but don’t particularly care about designs to skip to the next post after the first paragraph, while still providing the descriptions for the people who do.

5) Be aware of what your audience already knows.

When there’s a reasonable expectation that your audience might already know something, it’s okay to use some shorthand. This comes up often when describing memes.

For example, writing:

The Spiderman pointing at himself meme, where one Spiderman is labeled X and the other is labeled Y.

is much more succinct than writing:

A screencap of a cartoon. Two people in identical Spiderman costumes are standing in front of an NYPD vehicle, with one facing away from the viewer and one facing toward the viewer. They are both pointing at each other in identical poses. The Spiderman facing away from the viewer is labeled X in white text. The Spiderman facing toward the viewer is labeled Y in white text.

You’re writing for an audience of Tumblr users, so you can assume most Tumblr users are familiar with the meme. If they aren’t, you’ve given them enough information to look up more about it.

This is also something to consider when describing fanart. Most podcast characters by nature don’t have canonical appearances, so the choice of how to portray a character is often intentional on the part of the artist and something worth paying attention to when considering the purpose of a piece. This isn’t the case for all media, though, and re-describing characters with canonical appearances over and over again isn’t necessary unless those appearances differ significantly from the norm.

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We hope this was able to help! If anyone sees this and would like to add anything, please feel free to do so, and as always, if you have any more questions, feel free to reach out.

y’all, i feel like i need to remind y’all that there’s a huge difference between ignoring what’s going on, and taking a mental break because you’re exhausted with trying to keep up with the situation in the country right now. this shit is no joke and is weighing incredibly heavy on people such as myself and if you need to take a break from this and just log out, please do. please take care of yourself and don’t feel bad that you’re not keeping up with things at every second of the day.

god i keep reading the notes on this post about being privileged to take a break and i feel the need to explain a few things. one, a black man wrote this post. two, i clearly emphasized the point of ignoring what’s going on. I understand that non black people have the privilege of being able to “log out” and not be effected by this. black people like myself don’t have that privilege of just being able to log out. what i’m trying to say with this post is that you shouldn’t be feeling like shit all day and having anxiety attacks and generally feeling incredibly overwhelmed all the time. taking care of your mental health is not up for fucking debate and I don’t care what the color of your skin is, this applies to everyone. take care of yourself mentally and physically. i can’t believe I have to argue that people have the right to care for themselves amidst all the shit going on in the world today.

i’m a white person and bro, the shit going on in the US earlier in the year was a real catalyst to my first psych ward admission (not like police brutality against Black, Indigenous and people of colour, and other marginalised and multiply marginalised populations is a ‘new’ thing).

i felt completely powerless and like i had to prove my whole entire moral worth as a person via social media and while i learnt that the best thing to do was to amplify Black, Indigenous and people of colours voices AND to spread resources and awareness was the best thing to do in that situation, as well as show up to protests and educate ourselves, i just totally shut down as i couldn’t find the RIGHT posts to share, I didn’t want to spread trauma-porn to my BIPOC followers already suffering, and i couldn’t find something to do that seemed authentic and genuine (seeing as this was NOT a new problem), and in my mostly-white social media circles had barely even been addressed before George Floyd.

at one point, i didn’t even know whether we (whites) were doing this for solidarity or purely for reputation, and THAT thought fucks me up.

and i still dont know if my radio silence due to wanting to seem authentic and genuine during this time was more of a reflection of me and my personal faults and schemas and insecurities rather than a genuine desire to be more consistent and mindful in my awareness-spreading and a preference to have in-depth discussions with the people around me about what was and still, always, is going on in the fucked up world we live in

anyway, i still have a lot of guilt and regret over being so silent in that time and wish i could give out a billion of the sincerest apologies to Black, Indigenous and people of colour (and other marginalised identities), who may have seen my internet presence and thought of me as not an ally or safe presence to them. so, for what it’s worth and for whomever may see this, i’m so, so sorry.

i appreciate @colorsinautumn ‘s sentiment of looking after your mental and physical health despite your skin colour. it resolved me of a lot of the shame i’ve been carrying since that time. but i’m still fucking internally debating the quality of my heart (but that’s my own shit to deal with).

“...I understand that non-black people have the privilege of being able to “log out” and not be effected by this. black people like myself don’t have the privilege of just being able to log out. what i’m trying to say with this post is that you shouldn’t be feeling like shit all day and having anxiety attacks and generally feeling incredibly overwhelmed all the time. taking care of your mental health is not up for fucking debate and I don’t care what the color of your skin is, this applies to everyone. take care of yourself mentally and physically. I can’t believe I have to argue that people have the right to care for themselves amidst all the shit going on in the world today.”

since then, i’ve come across a few resources that i’ve found to be very accessible for people with ADHD and other learning disabilities who may struggle to read:

the first one is a documentary (with subtitles) on the continuation of Australia’s foul and disgusting treatment towards our First Nations peoples. it’s called Utopia, and you can access it for free here:

https://vimeo.com/168410495

the second one is a book called Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. If you have the money, I’d highly recommend purchasing the ebook, to support both the author and the publisher (Arsenal Pulp Press is very good and publishes lots of antiracist and queer content from authors with marginalised identities). If you can’t afford the book, https://gen.lib.rus.ec is a way you can get it for free. It’s about the intersectional Disability Justice movement, mutual aid, ‘care webs’ and life with neurodivergence (they have autism and other NDs) chronic illness and disability as a whole as a person of colour. It is an easy and accessible read, with essays in small chunks of writing, and using text-to-speech on iOS or mac, or, apps like Speechify and fonts like OpenDyslexic make it a lot easier.

the audiobook is available on the app/website Scribd if you’d like to read along with the audiobook.

this video is also an excellent starter for those who are interested in reading the book. it is also officially close-captioned (rather than auto-generated)

‘left-tube’ creators like philosophytube have a lot of content about police brutality, prisons, solitary confinement and racism to check out

if you want to read a book or get an introduction/discussion about it (with subtitles), searching youtube for the book title and author is bound to come up with something. Take Alex Vitale’s The End Of Policing (published by Verso, whom i highly recommend for both books and educational videos) for example:

or, Police: A Field Guide (a book about the history and abolition of the police) by David Correia and Tyler Wal (also published by Verso), brings up an interview with Vitale, Correia, and Wall:

or, this, an interview about the book and discussion:

, and, this youtuber has just started uploading the audiobook to youtube:

as well as The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

so yes, there are accessible ways to educate yourself about this stuff, whether you have ADHD, dyslexia or another learning disability—it just took me a while to figure it out.