With the recent news that the r/blind community has migrated to a lemmy instance, I thought now would be a good time to post a quick PSA on image descriptions.
Blind and low vision computer users often rely on screen readers to navigate their computers and the internet. These tools work great on text-based platforms (when the backend is coded correctly to make buttons and UI elements visible to the screen reader), but they struggle a lot with images. OCR and image recognition have come a long way, but they’re still not reliable.
On Lemmy, there’s no way (yet) to add alt text to image posts, but one thing that we sighted folk can do to make the website a more accessible place for the blind/low vision community is to describe the contents of the image in text, so screen readers (or braille displays) can interpret the text for the user. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy - you can see an example of me doing so in this post here - simply indicate somewhere that you are describing the contents of the image, and then do so in text. If you’re transcribing text, it’s best to do so as exact to the text in the image as you can (including spelling errors!). If you’re describing something visual, it’s best to keep it about the length of a tweet, but be as detailed as you need to be to give context to what you write about in the post.
If you’d like a more detailed guide on how to best do image descriptions and alt text, here’s a site that describes more specifics - https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/
Edit: You are able to add alt text to embedded images, as noted by @sal@mander.xyz here. This would only work for images within the text of your comment, not for image posts (topics which link to images).
Edit 2: @retronautickz@beehaw.org wrote a post on kbin on best practices in writing image descriptions and alt text.
If anyone here has some info on how to adequately include conversational dialogue, I’d really appreciate it.
I’ve done some reading on it once I realized kbin, at least, has that option, but I can’t find anything on this topic apart from “Try not to repeat information.” Which I think is implying I shouldn’t mention the speakers’ names more than once? I’m kind of winging it here as best I can.
If you’re transcribing text, transcribe all of the text, including repeated names.
I’ve no idea about accessibility in general, but that’s not the best advice for a newly aspiring author, much less the senior one.
If you’re new and trying to do two pages of dialogue in your first love story, it can be really easy to repeat the word ‘said’ fifty times in the first page. Spice it up with an extra ‘exclaimed’ or if you’re feeling funny, an extra ‘ejaculated’. Or at least, that’s how that advice goes. The problem with it is that ‘said’ is an invisible word, particularly in stories with dialogue. You might as well try to avoid using ‘the’ in your sentences. Better authors will have characters with individual voices and can skip the ‘person said’ altogether, since the reader will be easily able to distinguish the characters based on the context and the words being said.
For short stuff, keep ‘said’ in. You can have multiple people saying several things in order before it even becomes something you as the author get tired of, much less the audience who won’t read the story more than once anyways. Bare minimum, every character needs a ‘said character b’ done at least twice per scene. People (me) forget who’s talking unless your name is Brian Jacques and you can give every character their own actually well thought out accent. For conversations longer than a couple pages, consider using the occasional alternative descriptor, and also not using any at all.
Don’t avoid ‘said’. You need it to be legible. Just, consider using it slightly less if you have a shitton of talking to describe.
For comic dialogues a lazy
storyboard/movie script style would be plenty for everything published to /m/memes. See how acurrate the mental image that script gave you for yourself; https://kbin.social/m/CalvinAndHobbes/t/69427/Daily-Calvin-and-Hobbes-June-21-1993
-Transcribe all text.
-Explain differences in font, size, style, and case.