My posts are almost all visual content, and I’ve started including alt text in all my posts. Lemmy, Mbin and PieFed all support alt text with their default front ends, and Photon has it too. How good is my alt text? Am I writing too much or too little? Am I getting the necessary details and context across concisely enough? What can I change to make my alt text work better for you?

This illustration is Summer heat by Wenjun Lin, found on Artstation, Weibo, and Instagram.

    • hitstun@fedia.ioOP
      3·
      1 day ago

      Have vision-impaired users of Lemmy settled on an app or a front-end to use? I’m an Mbin user, so I don’t get to mess with those apps very much.

      • Bubs@lemmy.zip
        2·
        1 day ago

        No idea. I’ve never needed to use things like alt text, so I wouldn’t know.

  • fluxion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    It doesn’t really describe the scene that well. It mentions an elf, but another figure is present that seems just as significant. And “abstract” is a bit too…eh… abstract …there are other aspects worth describing: the “cloud” these other individuals are riding on, the smiles on their faces, the sense of them heading for an exciting destination.

    Imagine a straight up blind person reading that an trying to visualize and appreciate your work. I know that’s not gonna be your target demographic but i think that’s how you should look at it if you want to make a good quality alt text. Us non-blind folks also appreciate a good alt-text as well, especially for abstract scenes where we might want to find our bearings

    • hitstun@fedia.ioOP
      3·
      1 day ago

      Thank you; this is good feedback. Mbin pulled my alt text from my other recent post of this artwork, so it lost where I said this is Summer heat by Wenjun Lin. Sorry about that!

      It took me a little bit to understand this surreal scene, and then to look up the two main characters’ names and where they’re from. In his descriptions, the artist was mostly concerned with telling us this is a crossover between his own characters and a Tencent mascot. I didn’t actually describe them very much, since the real draw here is the strange free-standing block of water with fish inside, and then Little Song swimming even though she isn’t visibly in the water herself. Maybe I should describe the situation first, and then the characters in it.