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#AltText part 2: How to write Image descriptions?

  • Always say the format of the image your describing. It is an screenshot? A photo? a drawing? a meme?

  • Describe the placement of objects in the image and the spatial relation between them.

For example, let's say you have the image of a squirrel with a tree on the background. You could describe the image as:

"A squirrel looking at the camera. behind it, to the left corner (or which ever place the object may be) there's a tree."

  • Describe colours. You don't need to go on board with extremely specific shades, tones,etc, just general colours. But those may be needed when describing flags or things/animals that are two tones of the same colour.

Continuing the example. Let say the squirrel has a darker shade of brown in its ears, tail and chest than in the rest of its body. Describes de eyes too.

Do not forget to mention the colours of background objects too

"A squirrel looking at the camera. It's completely brown with it tail, ears and chest being of a darker shade of brown than the rest of its body. Its eyes are black and glassy looking.
Behind it, to the left corner (or which ever place the object may be) there's a tree. Its trunk is a grey-ish brown and the leaves at the top are different shades of yellow, red, and orange"

  • If there's a person on the picture, describe race, gender (if you don't know their gender for sure,use they/them pronouns and neutral language and add a presentation type "a person who presents as masculine" instead of "a man"), hair colour and style, clothing, accessories they wear (including glasses, hearing aids, etc) and the like. If the person is known, add their name. Important: what is the person doing?

Let add a person to our example then:

"A photo of a squirrel looking at the camera. It's completely brown with it tail, ears and chest being of a darker shade of brown than the rest of its body. Its eyes are black and glassy looking.
Behind it, to the left corner (or which ever place the object may be) there's a tree. Its trunk is a grey-ish brown and the leaves at the top are different shades of yellow, red, and orange. Behind the tree, more to the right of the squirrel, a person presenting as feminine, can be seeing looking at their phone. They're wearing a red blouse, a pair of jeans and red shoes. Their hair is blond and curly, and light complexion"

  • If known, add the breed of the animal or the type of plant. I don't know much about squirrels, so lets put the tree as an example:

"A photo of a squirrel looking at the camera. It's completely brown with it tail, ears and chest being of a darker shade of brown than the rest of its body. Its eyes are black and glassy looking.
Behind it, to the left corner (or which ever place the object may be) there's a hazelnut tree. Its trunk is a grey-ish brown and the leaves at the top are different shades of yellow, red, and orange. Behind the tree, more to the right of the squirrel, a person presenting as feminine, can be seeing looking at their phone. They're wearing a red blouse, a pair of jeans and red shoes. Their hair is blond and curly, and light complexion"

  • Describe emotions if posible.

"A photo of a squirrel looking curiously at the camera. It's completely brown with it tail, ears and chest being of a darker shade of brown than the rest of its body. Its eyes are black and glassy looking.
Behind it, to the left corner (or which ever place the object may be) there's a hazelnut tree. Its trunk is a grey-ish brown and the leaves at the top are different shades of yellow, red, and orange. Behind the tree, more to the right of the squirrel, a person presenting as feminine, can be seeing looking at their phone. They seem to be laughing as something. They're wearing a red blouse, a pair of jeans and red shoes. Their hair is blond and curly, and light complexion"

#Lemmy #Kbin #Thrediverse #Accessibility

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Alt Text on the Thrediverse

You can add #AltText in both #Lemmy and #Kbin by writing the image description between the brackets

! [Put your alt text here] (url)

Also, when you upload images from your pc on #kbin there's a text box below (with the words "Imagine alternative text" above it) where you can put your image description.

Other things to take into account to be more accesible to screen reader and TTS software users:

  • Casing of multi-word tags: Always write the first letter of each word on a hashtag containing several word uppercase. This way screen readers and TTS software can interpret and read them as separated words. Otherwise it would read them as one big nonsensical word

#/LikeThis not #/likethis

  • Avoid fancy/special fonts (I'm begging you): special fonts cannot be detected by screen readers and TTS software.
    Most of the time the letters are actually phonetic or mathematical symbols and the software interpret them as such.

  • Emojis are more accessible than emoticons, kaomoji and ASCII ART. Similar to fancy fonts with words, emoticons, koamoji and ASCII art make use of phonetic, mathematical, scientific and punctuation symbols to convey images. These are often read why assistive technology as the separated symbols that form the image, and not as the thing they're meant to represent. Emojis, on the other hand, have a text name incorporated that can be detected by these kind of software.

  • I don't think it's going to be a problem here, but wordle is a nightmare for Screen readers/TTS software as they can't detect the words and only describe the squares one by one. It's better to screenshot it and add an explanation of the results in alt text.