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i think the expectation i add alt text to photos is going to get to me eventually. i'm probably going to give up on it
‪it's one thing if it's a meme or a screenshot of text. i want that to be accessible, it's no great ask from me. i do that without thinking about it‬
‪but it's another thing when it's a photo and the purpose of posting it is to demonstrate the beauty of the object. how should i describe that to someone who can't see it? i'm imposing my own meaning onto it, preventing any “death of the author”, right?‬
‪alt text for a photo is an art in itself, it's a creative process. the alt text is its own artistic work. and that's beautiful, on the one hand, but it's also so, so difficult, and i feel like i'm betraying the original through every one of thousands of details i must not.‬
‪and you might say, well, without the alt text someone else will have no ability to experience it, that i'm making the work more accessible. and that's true, but i still wonder what the point of it is if this is so. my descriptions only make sense if you have a mind's eye.‬
‪who is the audience? i don't think it benefits someone with impaired sight, because they can still appreciate the work. does it benefit someone who has been blind their whole life? it conveys to them what i “see” in a photo, but they will never be able to interpret it themselves?‬
‪uhh, that was meant to say “thousands of details i must omit” earlier‬
‪i don't know. does all my work have to be accessible? when i write a song, do i need to describe it to someone who can't hear it? am i not doing them a disservice? if they had the sheet music, they could form their own interpretation, but am i obliged to provide one for them?‬
‪i wonder, if i tagged all my photos like they're on a booru, would that be enough… that's still an interpretation‬
‪the closer anything i make becomes to “art”, the harder it is to describe it, and the more reluctant i am to try‬
‪it also demands a certain knowledge of the subject that i simply do not have in many cases. i don't know how to describe in text the texture of a wall when i do not know what material it is made of‬
‪it'd be one thing if i was paid to post pretty photos online, but i'm not. i'm an amateur photographer who almost never posts any of her work anywhere because, among other things, alt text is an obstacle
‪anyway, if i start posting large collections of photos with no alt text, then i'm sorry, but that is probably the only way i can do it, and i hope that my eventual writing about what i see in my photos, and currently existing ai models that can interpret images, can substitute.‬
i think this is just another instance of me realising that guilt is a really troublesome emotion, at least for me personally, though i've seen the same sentiment expressed before by like… for lack of better words, tpot-adjacent people. even if the goal is good this means is bad
and it's complicated because i don't think people who try to nudge or push you towards putting alt text on everything necessarily want you to feel guilt about not doing so. (some do, certainly, but not all.) it's just a trap that people like me are too vulnerable to.
oh, right, that's the thing i was remembering: “awayness can't aim”. if you make people feel bad about not putting alt text on stuff, your goal might be to guide them towards putting alt text on stuff, but the same emotions work equally well for just not posting at all instead.
the online information sphere is just too good at making me feel guilty about doing things and trying to avoid them, rather than making me excited about doing better things instead and doing those… it's a pattern. i've gotten better at avoiding it with time, though.
as an aside: gods, i could write a lot of words about how memeplexes that make people feel guilty about engaging with particular kinds of art, or engaging with art in particular ways, are corrosive to the human project… but others can express it better and it doesn't spark joy
(also i'm not excited for the “hikari cancelled arc”)
two replies i got that i want to highlight:
• someone wished social media could crowdsource alt text, and i love this idea. i'd rather have a diverse set of interpretations than make it an all-or-nothing obligation on the original poster
• a tiny summary is better than nothing
@hikari “anything is better than nothing, but nothing is fine if you can’t come up with anything” is how I think this discourse should end and somehow it never does
@hikari@social.noyu.me I still miss when YouTube allowed people to submit translated subtitles for videos. That was such a great feature.
@hikari every cool girl has been cancelled at least once! i think my gf was three times, for completely inane shit
@hikari i’ve struggled with this a lot (i post a lot of photos) but have tried to force myself to do it anyway
my usual thought process is “is there an aspect of this photo that i want to emphasise, or where i’d be disappointed if someone glanced at it and didn’t notice it”
so e.g. if i’ve posted an image that i think is funny because of weird font usage, i’ll explain that in the alt text, but if the font choices are otherwise irrelevant, i won’t mention them at all
@hikari you have independently come up with the exact reason that the “you must provide alt-text for everything” discourse is so awful; it’s bizarrely laser-focused and it puts a large burden on people posting that often just results in either people not posting or people stopping doing alt-text entirely
it’s not actually mandatory though, and it being good doesn’t mean its absence is worth being mad about
@hikari fwiw it also benefits people using crappy internet (like me!) - they can decide whether they want to load the image or not. People with impaired sight might decide whether they want to spend more time looking at the image or not, perhaps...
@hikari I think you’re overthinking it and if you are not literally an accessibility facilitator being trained and paid to write professional captions for art, a few words like “a cute dog” just to orient someone to wtf you’re talking about is fine
@0xabad1dea @hikari 👆When I was out of the country accessing toots through a slow internet connection with images turned off, alt text saying literally anything was better than nothing.
Many things I want to put on the internet never even get into toots, much less something that requires effort like a blog. No expectation that other people are using this stuff more seriously than I am. Slapdash is the way. Nothing is fine if that’s what it takes to get it out there.
@hikari I don't think you have to go out of your way to describe everything in great detail. Often you can summarise the key elements in one or two sentences.
I think just trying to describe what it represents on a high level helps a lot in making people who can't see it feel not left out.
And if it turns out not be sufficient enough, people can always ask for more, right? But at least you're giving them a starting point.
@hikari Yeah, I feel like the question of "who is this for and what purpose does it serve" doesn't always get asked, but it really does guide what kind of alt text it'd even need.
The other thing is, the WCAG guidelines tend to emphasize concise descriptions in ways that posts about alt text here don’t. If the community guidelines don't line up with pre-existing "advice for writing alt text" guides, that makes it even harder to figure out.
@hikari I decided that I have no obligation to be accessible
@hikari hard agree on this.
I often think that for the trivial ones (describing an informative photography or schematic), the alt-text should travel side by side with the image as metadata.
People will repost images from wikipedia, from news outlets... which already had perfectly valid alt-text, but it's lost in the process.
And for non-trivial ones like a work of art I very much agree with you: it's a creative process that may or may not exist. It may or may not make sense.
@nirro yes, i think the way metadata is so easily lost online is really troublesome
