@Chron The best way to think about alt text is that you're telling people what's important about the image. Why did you include it? Which elements get the point or the joke across? That should be the focus of the description. However, something that's often overlooked is background. If you only describe foreground, it can lack context that helps people understand it or picture it in their mind. For instance: "Two people hugging," vs. "Two people hugging in an airport terminal."
@Chron Since you're discussing accessibiity, especially for screen reader users, it's important to also remember the value of #PascalCase when writing hashtags. Capitalizing each word in a hashtag enables screen readers to effectively parse each word correctly instead of running them together or having to spell out the entire thing. So, a better way to write out your alt text hashtag would be #AltText.
@pixelpusher220@Chron@supernovae My understanding is that due to different ways that users may capitalize and different ways federated servers may implement things, the software just takes whatever letters in whatever capitalizations and homogenizes them into all lower case, as it doesn't have a way to know which things "should" be capitalized for your particular use case. There might be a way to have it pick the most frequently used version instead of converging to lower case.
@Chron As a blind person alt text gives me basic access to images. Without it I don't even know there's an image in the post. Good alt text doesn't just tell me what the thing is, it describes it, with emphasis on detail, perspective, or whatever makes the image worth posting, and I don't at all mind a bit of editorial, like how the image might make you feel.
@Chron@superblindman Often screen shots of texts are posted without the actual text in the image description. Instead the alt text only contains something like "Screenshot of a tweet from XYZ about ZYX". When You post pictures from texts, run the picture through an ocr at least and put the result in the image description.
@Chron Vulcan has learnt a lot about accessibility (from a friend) for the web and Vulcan writes #AltText when necessary (mostly for photo submissions).
@Chron
Sometimes the #AltText is an opportunity to tell the rest of the story, or to explain the point of view, or even to give additional details. It can describe the mood of an image, the predominant color, or describe the form(s). I try to think of how to write a brief verbal description in order to create a mental image. Many times I fall short, but still make an effort.
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