#image descriptions

because i've already seen etiquette posts going around saying that we should all start rbing directly from op so that op can see the engagement on their own posts.

but what's gonna happen is that now if there's a post with an undescribed image, a person who wants to reblog that post but also wants to be accessible is going to have to ask themself, do i just not reblog this post because it's not accessible? or do i add an ID in my reblog, knowing that this will reduce op's ability to see the notes on their own post? either way i'm leaving somebody out. but this problem is completely avoided if the original post itself contains any necessary descriptions!

if you are new to image descriptions and feeling overwhelmed, here are some things to know that might make it less overwhelming:

a "bad" or very general ID is better than no ID. if you made a beautiful painting of a sunset and know it would take you forever to describe it, well, there's a reason they say a picture is worth a thousand words! you can seriously just say "painting of a sunset" and that is so much better than nothing. even something this simple tells you what it is not. this short post by @mightyoctopus about the importance of adding even a simple ID says it really well.

for screenshots of text, there are handy programs that can convert images of letters into plain text! i don't use one so i can't really speak to this, but i'll link to a post in which @pathos-logical has linked to her favorite OCR tool. (UPDATE: unfortunately that tool seems to have gone downhill lately. try www.imagetotext.info instead.)

or if it's easy for you to just copy and paste text into the post directly rather than taking a screenshot and then describing the screenshot, that might be less complicated. i know it really depends on how you're using tumblr, though - i imagine this is much easier on desktop than on mobile.

i have never encountered an ID writer who would be upset if op "stole" their ID and added it to the root post. in fact most ID writers actively encourage and even beg ops to do this. so if you do have a post that you posted without an ID and then someone adds one later, the next best thing is to copy and paste their ID into your original post. ID writers also do not mind at all if you edit their ID. and my sense is that it's also completely unnecessary to credit or @ the writer. just steal it! we don't mind!!

i'm not an expert on IDs so i will leave it there. and i do think it's possible to write IDs if all you know is the information in this post! it doesn't have to be intimidating, and it can improve not only other people's ability to engage with your work, but also (with this new tumblr update) your own ability to see that engagement.

if you are past the initial intimidation and want to learn more about the best ways to write IDs to accommodate the different ways people use them, i will just link to my image descriptions tag where i have collected the posts other people have made about this that i have found personally useful when writing IDs.

i also have a tag for examples of IDs that i have found particularly useful (often for images that i myself had no idea how to describe) and want to be able to refer to in the future when writing IDs: #described.

I just realised how much meme culture is visually focused & even though there are some that only involve text/sound, you’re still left with a big chunk of memes you can’t interact with?????

It’s honestly such a good question. I have a lot of thoughts about this actually because yeah, I do often feel like I am just totally not in the no on various memes. I am not completely blind, but I do not remotely have enough vision to interpret them without image descriptions.

The long and short of it is, if I’ve never seen that meme described before, I have no idea what it is or what it’s supposed to mean. This is actually an occasional frustration of mine when people are writing image descriptions for memes, because some people doing those descriptions will rely on the blind reader already understanding the original context of the meme and so they will leave out all of the important information that makes the meme what it is. For example, they might just say “the Spider-Man pointing meme but with character X and character Y,” without actually describing what the Spider-Man pointing meme is or what it looks like or why it’s funny.

When this happens, a lot of blind readers are just left feeling lost. I think there is sometimes an assumption that because everyone else on Tumblr is probably very familiar with this thing because they see it visually all the time, blind users must also be familiar with it because it’s everywhere, but chances are that only a very VERY small fraction of the instances of that meme have included alt text or image descriptions which means that when someone does describe it, that might be a blind user’s very first experience of that meme in an accessible format. That might be the very first version they’ve ever seen that they can interact with or understand, and so leaving out important information based on an assumption that everyone already knows what this meme is can perpetuate the issue. It’s probably a well meaning assumption that we know what those memes are, or maybe sometimes it’s just laziness, but either way it does often mean that we still don’t get to understand what that meme is because we probably don’t have that baseline understanding of it already.

I suppose this post is a bit of a PSA to image describers then lol. If you are writing a description for a meme, your first sentence can certainly still be a shortened overview because people who do already know it will appreciate getting to the point and those of us who don’t will appreciate learning that this is called the Spider-Man pointing meme, but your next sentence should always be to describe what the meme actually is and how it works so that blind readers can fully understand what’s happening in it if we have never encountered that meme format before.

Anyways, image description gripes aside, it is definitely true that we sometimes miss out on quite a bit of meme culture because of accessibility. I can’t tell you how many TikTok trends I just don’t have any conception of because there is no sound apart from a specific song or specific sound being reused with different visuals each time. I’m sure there are all sorts of visual video trends I don’t even know exist because all I can hear is the song.

Granted, I still get to interact with plenty of text based meme culture as well as the verbal kind, blind people definitely don’t just not understand meme culture in general because they’re certainly are still plenty that are perfectly accessible, but there is certainly a very large portion of inaccessible visual meme culture that we do tend to miss out on. I can’t tell you the number of discord servers I just straight up leave less than 24 hours after joining because sometimes the culture in a server involves conversations being like 50% meme gif sharing. I will often advocate for image descriptions in spaces I join, but when it’s clear that that’s the dominant method of interaction, that is honestly too much work for one person to try and shift the culture of a place like that so I will usually just leave.

I love that you brought this up because yeah, sure at the end of the day it’s not exactly the biggest problem we deal with, but it is a thing that does have real impacts on how we interact in online spaces especially. Even in person, there is nothing more awkward than hanging out with several friends and one of them showing a meme to everyone else while they all laughed together, but not describing it for you, so you are just left feeling like you are no longer part of that moment. It’s definitely something that can make it a little bit harder to hang out in largely sighted spaces, and on the Internet, it can make an entire community feel unreachable for us.

I see so many posts from other disabled people who aren’t blind talking about how the Internet has served as a sort of unifying safe space for them, how the Internet has provided them access to things they never had before, because even if there isn’t an accessible entrance to a restaurant or something, they can still go online and have a bit of a break from all that. And as a wheelchair user myself, I wish that it could be that for me. But with blindness, it just isn’t that way, because so much of the Internet is image based and so little of it is made accessible, so the Internet is often just as hostile and inaccessible to us as the real world, if not more so. I have even been part of actual disabled online groups that also refused to provide image descriptions but still insist on sending plenty of memes and gifs, because apparently everybody except blind people are welcome.

now, unless the image describer reblogged the image directly from OP, i'm pretty much shit out of luck. with how many reblogs are added to a post, it'll be virtually impossible to look through each comment and see if there's an image description in there. and if the post is comprised of multiple images throughout reblogs, image descriptions will be even harder to find.

this also discourages people from reblogging image descriptions, as the notes are attributed to the describer rather than the OP. not only that, but the OP is even LESS likely to even see the image description in the first place.

i guess i shouldn't be surprised over the website that doesn't even alt text their @staff posts.