Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing professional work by the age of 15. via @wikipedia
@gutenberg_org@wikipedia She was 20 years old and a rape survivor when she first painted Judith (also her beheading painting is way better than Caravaggio's imo):
@gutenberg_org@_L1vY_@wikipedia Please use ALT as intended — to provide an actual description of the image. What you provided is a caption, which tells me absolutely nothing. ALT's sole purpose is to provide those who cannot process the image with as equivalent & autonomous an experience as possible.
A picture may be worth 1000 words but without proper ALT, how am I to know a single one of them?
@oedipusnj Thanks for your comments. Our goal is to provide information about authors and their books in order to promote books that are in the public domain.
@gutenberg_org That neither answered my question nor solves the problem I have. You chose that image to provoke a reaction in the perceiver. It is akin to a book cover, which sets the readers expectation of the contents of the book just by its look & feel.
All of this comes free, provided you have a pair of functioning eyeballs & an optical cortex with which to process their output. All I am asking is that you make a reasonable accommodation, especially when blind & visually impaired individuals are ravenous & voracious consumers of digital content.
You need not provide an exegesis. Briefly describe the image, taking special care to articulate the unspoken aspects of the image which led you to choose this particular image in order to attract the most eyeballs.
Image of a dark haired woman painting on a canvas on the wall.
Her hair is partly in disarray, the right sleeve of her dress is pushed up to her elbow as she is holding the pencil.
Her face is flushed from exhaustion, but extremely concentrated whilst she is resting her left arm, palette in hand, on a small table.
She wears a necklace with an extremely tiny male head as pendent.
This is, what I would have written.
I hope, it's OK
@Mina@gutenberg_org That is a wonderful description. You captured the essence of the image while describing it. Especially appreciated is detail about the pendant.
#ALT4You - this is a tag you can use whenever you describe an image, so that other people who need a description can also take advantage of your work & kindness. There's also #ALT4Me which people use to tag an image they need described. Since this is a crowd sourced volunteer service, everybody is more than welcome to monitor it to provide a reasonable accommodation & make social media much more social.
To all seeing people who consider writing image descriptions as too tedious: I understand, I felt the same at first, but once you have done a few , it just becomes normal.
Now, I even enjoy writing them, to think about, what really matters about the image.
E.g. That Artemisia's dress was light green and the canvas kind of brownish, is, I think, an unnecessary detail.
@Mina@gutenberg_org Thank you not only for your ALT but for your impassioned plea for everyone to use it.
Color is not an unnecessary detail. Only 13 to 15% of the blind are totally blind. Everybody else is trying to maximize what visual acuity remains to them, everything from blobs of color; to an extremely restricted viewport, like looking through a cocktail straw; to anything 20/200 or below & innumerable variations in between.
Therefore, many with low vision, like some with neurodivergence, will use the ALT to walk-through elements of the image, often at extremely high magnification, in order to come to an understanding of the image as a whole, something they cannot do physically. For such users, color is very important.
I really appreciate it, especially as this was the very first time ever, after three years on Twitter and eight months on Mastodon, that I got feedback to a description of mine.
As someone who's always quick to speak up when I encounter a lack of ALT, I think it's also extremely important that we speak up whenever we encounter ALT that truly meets our needs, & do our part to boost it so that others may learn from the example. 🐱😎
@Mina@gutenberg_org I agree. Instantly, from when I first arrived here last fall, I discovered that #Caturday here is much more enjoyable than anywhere else because so many people do describe their images.
I think it's a combination of the people who are attracted to Mastodon & the dedication of those maintaining it to support accessibility & constantly seeking ways to improve it.
Only recently I've started to use a wonderful tool called Mona for Mastodon, that's specifically designed to work with iOS' accessibility features, & I truly feel — now that I can fully interact with the site — like I have once again found a gloriously intersectional community.
@oedipusnj@Mina@gutenberg_org
Those tags seem like a pragmatic way of dealing with this. Thing is that I often don't have time to add Alttext to an image I quickly took and shared, but when somebody needing it would just as quickly comment with Alt4Me, I'd happily add it at some later point.
I'd guess that a lot of people would be very motivated to add Alttexts once they receive message of somebody who needs it (at least I'd be, and usually I'm no exception, even though I am Super Grover!)
Add comment