#alternative text

Lmao

I wanted to ask a quick question for those who know better than me, particularly those who use some kind of screen reader:

I was thinking about moving to using the on-image alt text rather than putting it in the caption part of the post, which is what I’ve been doing. This will allow me to write more descriptions about my art (and make longer multi image posts) without having a huge amount of text under the image. I’ve also been shortening my personal commentary since I am already using a lot of text for the image description and I feel like I’m making the posts very long (and to my understanding, putting the alt text under a read-more makes it useless?)

I had initially heard there were issues with tumblrs built in alt text hence me placing descriptions in the post body. But that was years ago now it seems like this has been resolved?

Also anyone who uses a screen reader please let me know your tips or opinions on what makes good alt text and the level of detail I should use describing my own art.

“Anything from the In-betweens and up is part of Dreamtide, and anything from the In-betweens and down, is part of the Dark Slumber! It's super easy to understand!”

~ Mei.

[id: the crew from The Terror AMC as the crew from Among Us.]

i'm SURE this has been done before but still- AMOGUS

the dumb comic with hickey is a ref to this tik tok

[Image description: a white woman with blonde hair is saying: (text)]

Imagining someone couldn't see or see well, they might have watched community and reconize Britta and get the joke. But lady with blond hair means absolutely nothing and takes her out of context.

You also don't need [image description] depending on context. "Image:", "description:", or just jumping into the description is fine.

So a better caption might be;

[Image: Britta from Community: (text)]

I don't want to drag this person in particular or anyone doing image captioning, they're putting effort into making the world more accessible. I just see long captions with no context and SO MUCH unnecessary description all the time it annoys me to no end

So general rules:

As little words as you can

As much context as possible (not description)

Image intro seldom needed

Over the past few days there have been wonderful posts by wonderful people that are very important and ought to be shared. However a lot of these posts are linked to Twitter/ Instagram and are shared through automation, and hence they lack Image Descriptions or Alternative Texts.

We have formed a Tumblr group where we share these posts, and individual volunteers can repost them with IDs.

If anyone is interested in joining the group of volunteers and pages dealing with social activism to collaborate, DM @decoloniszing ! Or send a request to join.

This is important because accessibility shouldn't be a brownie point or an add on. It should be normalised.

And please give this a signal boost.♥️⚡

tl;dr: “Thinking of alt text encourages me to be intentional;” “Writing alt text helps me to see what really matters;” “Writing alt text helps me to understand what matters *to me*”