Hello!
I’ve added a new rule to the side bar:
- When posting an image containing text, provide alt text in the post body. This helps users with limited vision participate in our community. Providing alt text on all image posts is strongly encouraged.
This rule was added as a response to an increase in image posts where the main content is the text in the image with no provided alt text.
A lot of people with limited vision rely on service dogs to function, and it would be really unfortunate to exclude them from this community. This also lets users more easily copy-paste and translate post content.
Alt text is generally a rough description of the content alongside a caption of the text on the image.
EDIT: After further discussion, I believe it is important to encourage alt text across the fediverse even on non-text image posts. I strongly encourage submitters to put a short alt text in the post body when posting images of their pets, and I encourage commenters to generate alt text for posts where the submitter may have forgotten to put one in the body.
Here’s a good example of alt text:
Alt: My brown and white Border Collie, sitting on my computer chair looking outside through the window.
https://lemmy.ca/post/71504213
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.
You must log in or register to comment.
This is obviously not needed for pictures of your pets or where the content is otherwise purely visual in nature.
Sorry, why is this obvious? What makes pictures of pets different from other pictures? And what does “purely visual” mean?
I think they mean if the alt text is just “a picture of a dog” then that won’t really help a person with visual impairments. But if it’s a meme or something and contains text, then the text can be transcribed into the alt-text so a person can still read it.
What do you mean that won’t help? “A picture of a dog” tells a person with visual impairments what the picture is. That’s the whole point. If you don’t put anything, they’ll just know that there’s a picture but not if it’s important or interesting or worth their time to ask.
What might a picture with no further context in a community called “dogs” be about?
Who knows? The person who can’t see it certainly doesn’t.
That does not mean everything posted here is exclusively photographs of dogs and nothing else. And even then an image description would make sense because what does the dog look like, what is it doing, is there anything else interesting about the picture?
Did you click the link? It was a /j 😄
I’m 100% open to discussion on that one, but it’s because I consider pictures of pets to be “decorative” (as per WCAG) as a no-vision user would get no useful benefit from knowing that there is a picture of a dog as the enjoyment is mostly visual, while a low-vision user would still have a blurry, distorted or partially obstructed view of the picture to kinda figure out what’s going on.
I also didn’t want to make the rule too intense as my target is really just text in posts, and it’s uncommon for Lemmy communities to request users to add alt text, so people may not know how much or how little description to add to their alt text anyway.
I guess it’s not so obvious after all 😅
The “decorative” category is for websites where you can have visual design elements accompanying text, with the text being the important bit. If you’re making an entire post about a picture, it’s not decorative. You’re showing the picture to other people, the content of the picture is the point of your post.
You’re right, I think I’m used to work making us put full photographs in our apps that actually add nothing of value other than “pretty splash page” so I got used to it haha
I’ll mull it over. I don’t want to burden and scare users too much either with how small Lemmy’s user base already is, though accessibility is important to me. My main issue is with text-in-image posts, like Twitter screenshots and those Hallmark style graphics.
I agree with your desire for alt text as well as your concern about burdening people - most people don’t even know it exists, let alone how to write it.
Maybe instead of a rule, you could make it a suggestion (for all posts, not just images with text)? That would still encourage the behavior without mandating it. If someone else provides alt text in a comment, you could potentially pin that as well to make sure it’s easily findable.
I think I want to encourage alt text on all posts but make it mandatory on text-as-image posts. At least a transcription of the text.
I’m not always around, so I can’t guarantee a quick pin (does Lemmy even have a pin feature besides “speak as moderator”?)
Lemmy does have a feature to “Feature in community”.
I’m here to support the encouraging of all images having alt text. People with low vision may not get the same view of the image, but without alt text they may not even know what the image is at all!
Alt text for pictures of pet dogs should also be more than just “picture of dog”. Whatever is important in the picture should be included, e.g. “A picture of my golden retriever sitting on a couch, looking at camera with happy look on her face”.
This way someone who can’t see the picture well can still participate, e.g. “Oh I love golden retrievers, I have three and they are always chewing up my slippers but I love them anyway”.
I’m here fighting for us to get better at alt text as it’s something Lemmy does poorly compared to Mastodon.
I’m sold, thank you for the write-up! I’ll add a “adding alt text to pictures is heavily encouraged” note next to the mandatory alt text for text images rule.
I generally add an alt tag when I upload images as comments, but Lemmy does not prompt you for one when uploading a main image to a post, so I think it’s a good reminder to add it to the post body.
And yes, I’m aware of “feature in community”, but isn’t that only for posts?
