In a similar vein, alt-text your image posts here!

crossposted from https://wandering.shop/@meredithw/113983437672884349

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Are there any blind people on Lemmy, screenreading this? I get why alt-text is useful functionally on things like application interfaces, and instructive or educational text, but do you actually enjoy hearing a screen reader say "A meme of four oanels. First panel. An image of a young man in a field. He is Anakin Skywalker as played by that guy who played Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. He says 'bla bla bla'. Next frame. An image of a young woman. She is Padme as played by Natalie Portman. She is smiling. She says "bla bla bla, right?"
- the question is do you need at least one blind person to justify alt text or do you want the alt text to make it possible for blind people or people with impaired vision to enjoy if they ever stumble upon it?
  
  This! I often hear certain restaurants don't have ramps because disabled people don't eat there. And we don't because there's no ramp.
  
  I think they simply dont want to waste their time. Its a legitimate question, comes up with handicapped regulations on physical businesses too, although that usually costs money and time.
  
  oh what an inconvenience... I wish I was blind so I didn't have to spend 4 more minutes transcribing 20 words on a meme.
  even if you think it's a waste of time, I didn't even comment on the validity of the question. I just gave them the actual consideration they should have.
  oh and even if you completely ignore accessibility on that front, transcribing images makes them infinitely more searchable. no one knows what a title would be, people usually don't put anything helpful or something you can remember. but if you know some of the words you might be able to find it.
  it's like finding songs by searching lyrics from a random part of the song you heard or remember. it would be so much harder if you had to know the title.
  
  There's also the element of wasting the blind person's time. I work in enterprise software and our application meets WCAG guidelines but... it's a busy, text-heavy, actions-heavy application. It can take 5 minutes for a screen reader to read the entire page. Other websites are worse - images as buttons, flavour images and hero banners and icons everywhere. Again, a much more accessible version is just presenting them with what they actually want - a cleaner, leaner, more contextual page like the ones we built in the 90s before images loaded instantly.
  So part of me wonders if blind people actually enjoy "listening to memes" or if they'd rather skip it and hear a text-based joke or an audio/video joke. I did specifically say I wanted a blind person's opinion on it.
  I think you've underestimated the wordcount and I think you don't get how memes are shared if you think adding 4 minutes to their re-transmission wouldn't matter. I cars that blind people enjoy the internet but I absolutely do not think "searchability" is a good reason to transcribe "Drake meme but it's an animal girl. Top panel. Animal girl looking repulsed. The item she is repulsed by is the logo of a Linux package manager called Flatpak..."
  
  I specifically said searchable referring to images in general, not memes. I don't think people search memes that often.
  i also didn't specify verbosity. Blind people are people, idk why we're talking like they're a different species. Whether or not you should alt text an image is directly related to whether or not you consider that image part of the content.
  a meme is the content, when someone is looking at a post that's what they're looking at and reading. if someone wouldn't want to read it they can stop reading as soon as they see that it's a meme. if they want to read it they can keep going.
  so no, I don't think meme transcriptions should be as verbose. so it's just "animal girl is repulsed by flatpak". you're explaining it to people who don't see as well, not people who were born yesterday.
  
  If an uncaptioned tree falls in the woods without any blind people around...
  Its a genuine question: how much enjoyment does someone with a visual impairment get from a meme that's purely a visual gag? You could go through a lot of work to make a cliff face wheelchair accessible but it will never be the same experience as rock climbing
  
  Blindness is a spectrum! So for example, someone could maybe make out the stick figure shape in a comic but not the speech bubbles. Most blind people can still see things but it greatly helps to have things read out as an aid to quite literally see the whole picture :)
  And now I wanna try rock climbing as a wheelchair user just because, lol
  
  Very fair point 👉
  
  your analogy makes no sense, and neither does your argument.
  first of all the purpose of making places wheelchair accessible is to make it possible for people in wheelchairs to go there, not to give them "the experience" whatever the fuck that is supposed to be.
  like, what do you even know what the wheelchair experience is like, and what makes you think what people in wheelchairs want is the experience of rock climbers, rather than the ability to experience something themselves? have you ever seen an interpreter sign a rap song? what do you think that's for? to stimulate hearing?
  second of all, memes are rarely "purely visual" gags. I don't even know what makes you even think that. because they're in an image format? you do realize a woman staring at her boyfriend who's checking out another woman is in no way a visual gag, right? it's not about how they look, it's what they're doing.
  or, to argue on a more basic level, if it's purely visual why does it have fucking words?
  
  My question simplified: when is the juice worth the squeeze? Most memes have text but lose their humor without the visual aspect.
  It's the difference between a comedian nailing the delivery of a punchline with a perfect impression + cadence + body work and reading a transcript of the bit.
  In your rap interpretation example there are both visual and lyrical components to the performance, both of which are significant and individually enjoyable pieces of the art. A better example would be handing sheet music to a deaf person so they could enjoy an orchestra on tv.
  On the girlfriend gag: it absolutely is visual. The nuance of the expressions and body language directly increase the effort and skill required to reproduce it.
  I could accurately describe it "A man holding hands with woman who looks at him. He looks at a third woman. Captioned [...]". I could spend more time to better convey the humor but the delivery is no longer the meme. It can only ever be as good as my own ability to describe it in a parallel work.
  From that logic, would the blind even be enjoying same content anymore? There are images that translate easily and readily to text, and I agree that everyone should be in the habit of trying to do it. But in making it a rock solid rule it kind of loses the spirit of inclusion in favor of dogma.
  On a more basic level, if you could easily write the joke in text why is it an image?
- alt text is a part of the post quality like any other
- I do alt text on my image posts, especially OC content as I find it's a curb cutting effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect
  I'm not the only person in a rural area who has internet access, and sometimes the alt text is enough to convey the joke/image than the image itself.
  Plus I find it a fun test of my vocabulary to use the words I need to explain the joke/image. Sometimes I don't know the right words and I learn a new one.
  
  When the instance hosting the image dies the alt text stays so I can still read the old posts even if image is long gone into enthropy.
  
  I actually didn't consider that as a bonus. Nice to know that helps future readers of my shitposts.
- I personally know many blind people on the fediverse, yes.

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