social.noyu.me

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.‬

@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.