Often, when people have undescribed media in their posts, people will reblog with a description in a comment and ask the OP to edit the description into their post. Great, right?

Except if the OP won't see anything not reblogged from the original post, there is no chance they'll be able to edit the description in. And if the new etiquette becomes to avoid adding commentary in reblogs, describers may come under fire for accessibility.

Yeah! Let me teach you.

I'll use the image below as an example:

[ID: Mabel Pines from Gravity Falls smiling and gesturing with her hands. She is a girl with long brown hair and braces. She wears a teal sweater with a strawberry on it and a matching teal headband. /End ID.]

Now, I've written an image description. I can keep it below the image, but what if I want to put it in the alternative text?

I'll click the three dots on the bottom right of the image:

[ID: the above image of Mabel screenshotted in the post. A meatball menu on the right has been clicked, opening a small rectangular menu titled, "Image Options". Below is written "Update image description". /End ID.]

Click "Update image description", and it'll take you to this:

[ID: a menu titled "Image Description" in bold text, subtitled "By adding an image description to your post, you are making it more accessible for screen reader users." in small text. Below is a text box with "Max 4,096 characters" written in it, and at the bottom are buttons reading "Cancel" and "Update". /End ID.]

Now I can copy and paste my image description into the alt text!

Now, there are still things to consider— when should you put the description in the alt text, and when should it be below? How do you write an image description?

For those questions I refer you to @anistarrose— specifically this guide here, [link] (and this additional post by someone else for the first question here [link])

—and this masterpost. [link]

My mutual is asking me how to add image descriptions

[ID: The rainbow dolphins meme, a complex/detailed drawing of vibrant ocean life under the water and dolphins leaping joyfully beneath a rainbow above. End ID.]

Hello Fool! I'm glad you ask!

I'll start off explaining how to do descriptions of text posts. These are the easiest things to describe (at least for me.)

Let's go with an example post:

[ID: a post by i-eat-rusty-nails reading "Two of my mutual have written image descriptions recently this is so cool" /End ID.]

This is a pretty simple ID. It's a short post without any reblogs, there isn't much information to convey. Level of detail is a careful balance, but one that's easy to maintain here. With longer posts, things get harder. The thing to maintain is relevancy. [PT: relevancy.]

[ID: two replies to a post. lazyuser03 says "Can I get some context?" batteryacidlover responds, "A user by the name of spamtongspamton used an exploit to steal a total of 3 billion dark dollars (one user lost $1997001997) only to get immediately banned by the admin" /End ID.]

This tells you relevant information in the screenshot. Sighted people can see the exact dates and numbers of likes a post has, but that usually isn't important information. You likely didn't even pay attention to it while reading the screenshot. Adding too much will make the description confusing and harder to write. (I recommend copy pasting your description into Google Translate and using the speak function to get an idea of what it sounds like when a screenreader sees a post.)

I have seen some incredibly wordy ID's in my time on this website. As I said before, level of detail is a careful balance. But the trick to finding that balance is thinking about what is important to include. In the image example above, I didn't mention in the description the exact dates or number of likes on each reply (something I have seen people do.) Just the names of posters and the text.

Example time again!

[ID: a post by schofielded made September 15th with an image. A reblog by hearthfire-heartfire contains an image description:

[image description: a screenshot of a tumblr post dated september 13 written by user schofielded reads:

"why do people post screenshots of tumblr posts on tumblr. did you know there's an easy way to get it on your blog without doing that"

end ID]

a reblog by idlydecayingcorpse reads, "it bothers me when people do this without putting nothing in the alt text.

Like yeah I get op disabled reblogs or whatever but you can still copy paste it and put it in the alt. All you have to add is 'post by [original poster]', the date/pfp if it's important, and "Reads: [copy pasted post]" /End ID.]

Please use this description as reference for both how to ID longer posts with reblogs and use @idlydecayingcorpse's addition as a guide to phrasing your IDs of posts.

I also recommend using OCR [link], a tool that extracts text from images to help with writing descriptions (especially for longer posts!)

I'll end this with some resources for you.

[PT: I'll end this with some resources for you.]

For description feedback and to crowdsource descriptions for posts, I recommend the People's Accessibility discord server. [link] I actually crowdsourced the description for the image at the beginning of this post from there!

I also recommend checking out @anistarrose, I've had luck sending asks to that blog for further information on how to do video descriptions and there's also quite a few posts linked in the pinned that I would recommend as resources.

Here's a google doc with meme description templates. [link]

(about to go to dinner, will do that when I get back)

[ID: a divider showing the surface of an outdoor lap pool. it is dark and has blue lane lines. end ID.]

its aren from @butchlifeguard and @describedmcr! this is a blog for putting image descriptions on pool and water photos

if i add an id to your post, you can put it on the original post, no credit necessary

I haven't yet done any investigation to see if this is caused by my screen size, and if it is, at what size does it start if it's about dynamic coding or device.

Just putting this out there to see if anyone else has noticed and done some investigation already. I might have time this Wednesday to mess around with screen sizes to see for myself.