#accessibility tag

I originally put this in a reblog, but it deserves to be its own post, too.

On the topic of plain text: This is not an official word you’ll find in accessibility guides. In general, text on websites is already accessible to screen readers with very few exceptions. Screen readers are literally made to read text.

These exceptions inlude

Copy paste fonts (these generally read as gibberish to a screen reader)

Text with alternating upper case and lower case letters (like in that one Sponge Bob meme)

Rainbow text in the web/browser version of tumblr (This is specific to tumblr. Rainbow text in general is not a problem and can be implemented in accessible ways. It’s even accessible in the tumblr apps.)

Images/ screenshots of text (these aren't actually text, they're images)

Stuff like small text, big text, italics, fonts, and colored text, are not an issue for screen readers. I have never heard of a screen reader user having problems with these, and no official accessibility guidelines have restrictions on these.

You do not need to provide plain text versions of formatted text for the sake of screen reader users. I do not know where this myth comes from, but it’s untrue.

However, there are cases where providing plain text makes sense. For example, when reblogging a post with small text, I generally copy it in normal font size in my reblog. This is not for screen reader users. This is for people who sight-read who cannot read small font. Providing plain text versions of colored text is also often done for the sake of people with migraines or eye strain.

It is good to make posts accessible to people with migraines, but it help no one to incorrectly conflate this with screen reader accessibility. These are two separate accessibility issues.

Yes, of course! You asked so nicely, how could I not

I write image descriptions mainly for blind/visually impaired people. Many of them use screen readers, which, when faced with an image, will just say "image", so they need some text describing the image, and then the screen reader will read that text and then they'll know what the image shows

That's not the only thing image descriptions are useful for! There are other people that benefit from them, I remember hearing about some people with ADHD who finds image descriptions helpful as well, or just people who have slow internet that won't let images load. There are also blind people that don't use screen readers but still benefit from image descriptions, and I'm sure there are more examples I'm forgetting about here!

There are many sites that have alternative text options, which work similarly to image descriptions, but some sites' alt text options aren't very good/accessible (like Tumblr's), so image descriptions can be a better alternative in those situations. Whether someone prefers image descriptions or alt text tends to vary from person to person. But since most images I see/reblog don't even have alt text, I tend to write image descriptions for those. Just a way to help make this site/my blog more accessible for everyone!

artists who put someone’s ID in the original caption so more people see it (esp with the new update fucking up the above)

people who write image descriptions for posts they reblog

people who put image descriptions in posts they make

If I can look at an image with my eyes and get the general gist, but a non-sighted user using a screen reader has to listen to three rambling pseudo-artistic paragraphs to have a general idea because you're describing every element in detail one after the other, that is not an equivalent web experience and you have actually made the image less accessible.

If you are the artist of a visual art image, it is acceptable to write a short image description in the body of the post in the style of alternative text, and then place a long description under a cut or within a hyperlink—but unless you are highly skilled in creative writing and understand the principles of art description, you are likely wasting your time.

However, that does somewhat replicate the experience of a sighted user being able to glance at a visual post and then decide if they would like to look with more detail.

If you are not trained in photographic or art description, and/or you are not the artist, then by writing a long description you are not only imposing your own view and opinions about the elements of a visual piece on any users who rely on the image description and taking away their ability to form an independent opinion, you are also making the web experience much more difficult for them. You do not have the right to determine their experience purely by virtue of being sighted.

How would you feel if your only way of accessing a work was other people's description, but every description you came across described things in a different order, called out different kinds of elements, and drew attention to things that you did not have access to or context about due to an inability to perceive it? If they used subjective, vague adjectives that have a different meaning depending on the speaker, or used specific words out of context or incorrectly?

And when you realised the description wasn't going to tell you straight up what the content was, you skipped the first paragraph, only to find that you had several more to skip through as well, and then additional commentary from other users that you can't engage with because you're still not really sure what that person was actually describing?

Your experience would be frustrating!

That is what it is like when an image description is multiple long rambling paragraphs describing every object, color and idea in a visual piece. It's a pain to deal with and it does not improve the web experience.

If you also get asked for feedback, feel free to also enter this, along with any parts of tumblr that are inaccessible to you personally. One report is easy to ignore, but if enough people feedback this, maybe this will get picked up and fixed

Do you like them? Would you prefer to listen to some things (e.g. blogs) read by a person instead of software? Or does it not matter to you? Or is there already another option out there that I'm not aware of?

The reason I'm asking is that I listen to a lot of audio books and that got me thinking about people accessing fanfiction, blogs, Tumblr posts, etc.

Thanks for the question! I actually love my screen reader. It gives me agency and independence.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I personally prefer screen readers over audiobooks. I am not just passively listening, I am in control of the voice, speed, pronunciation, and much more.

I am not just listening top to bottom. I can jump around, navigate to paragraphs or headings, repeat things or have them spelled, etc.

An audiobook read by real person will always have something of them in there. It’s in the inflection, the emotion, the emphasis, the way they’re doing voices for different people. A lot of people enjoy it or even see it as the main selling point of an audiobook, but I prefer the neutrality of my screen reader. I want to infuse my own meaning into the book and not get it from someone else.

But this is completely my personal opinion. Everybody is different. There are also screen readers and voices that imitate human emotion a lot more than mine. I prefer the more robotic ones.

Another thing I prefer is the incredible speed you can listen to with a robotic voice. I also listen to YouTube at 1.75 speed, but 2x can become difficult depending on the speaker. It’s easier with a synthetic voice due to its perfect and consistent pronunciation.

For me, my screen reader is truly as if I’m reading on my own. Because I am. Using a screen reader is reading. It’s just a different way of accessing a text for people with (visual) disabilities.

Audiobooks are also a way of reading and they’re super important for accessibility for a lot of people, and I would never discount that. However, for me, my screen reader feels a lot closer to reading the way I used to back when I sight-read.

Making text screen reader accessible is the easiest thing in the world. You have to do literally nothing. It’s text. Screen readers are literally build to read text on a screen.

If you’re a total noob who knows nothing about HTML and you just put your text in your document, nothing else, it’s accessible. You put it in a <p> tag? Accessible. Span? Div? All accessible. You can fucking echo it in a PHP file and it will be accessible.

Text is literally accessible by default. How do all these people manage to fuck it up so bad????? I wouldn’t be able to do that if I tried!

The only consistently accessible literature website, if you can call it that, is AO3. Fan fiction is great. I love fan fiction, but I don’t want to read only fan fiction. There’s a long list of books I want to read – fiction, but especially non fiction.

And there’s a long list of websites where these books are available, both legitimate and piracy. And yet! And yet I cannot read them, because I am disabled. Because I do not read with my eyes, but with my screen reader. Because nobody cares about us enough to even consider us when building and formatting a website. Because nobody cares about us enough to do a single manual test or run a free accessibility checker extension.