Said with no malice, just bluntness — a lot of your alt text descriptions suck. They don’t actually take the art itself into account. I notice you say a lot of things like “A sculpture of a brown dog.” But you’re never specific about what that sculpture looks like. Art has proportions, shades, visible texture, cracks, blemishes, streaks, brushstrokes, fingerprints, burn marks, signs of love and culture and aging and birth and death and hardship. If you’re going to make art accessible, that means more than just giving a description of what the thing is. You have to describe the entire thing itself. Visually impaired people aren’t going to get to experience the entire thing otherwise. And for people who have been on the blind spectrum their whole lives, they might not even know exactly what a dog looks like to seeing people. They might see something different, or not at all.
Hi there,
If you're referring to alt texts, we don't actually write those, the artist does - or at least whoever made the Tumblr post that adds the image.
If you're referring to the IDs we write, we try to focus on the most important aspects first (so that people can quickly decide if the full ID is of interest or not) and then flesh out the details, but there's always going to be a limit as to how much is practical and useful to describe. Where e.g. the wear and tear on an object is significant, we do mention it, especially if it seems relevant to the narrative of the piece or it's clearly visible.
At a certain point, detailing every specific detail is going to take more away from the ID than it adds because it becomes repetitive and "noisy". Adding to that, we do unfortunately have limited time and energy to write IDs - and at least personally, I would be unable to write many IDs if it required that level of exhaustive detail. We're not professionals, this is a community volunteer effort and there's a lot of factors balancing things. In the end, we feel - and discussing with people who use our IDs has backed this up - that the IDs are best off balancing detail and length to avoid taking too many spoons or obscuring relevant details.
For certain concepts, we also don't describe them explicitly here because IDs are very likely to exist for them elsewhere.
For instance, whilst someone blind from birth may not know what a dog looks like, IDs of golden retrievers certainly exist and describing them "A long haired 4-legged animal with ..." in every ID that contains one would be a lot of noise for people to sift through once they do know.
Ultimately, you're very welcome to start creating your own more detailed IDs too! The more people who contribute IDs, the better. I would also submit that, whilst your intention isn't to be rude, the way this ask is written is quite hurtful and we would appreciate a more polite phrasing next time.
