Post #2485436

2023-07-23 21:18 UTC

@@richardrathe@universeodon.com @@fheinderyckx@mastodon.social I think it depends on the context of the picture within a post. Let's assume it's a post like on Instagram or Pixelfed. A picture, and the post is all about that picture. If the post itself is about the picture, then you can easily get away with describing the picture in the visible part of the post. If you had to scroll a lot to get past the description to the actual picture because the description is so massive that you couldn't see all of it plus the picture at once even on a 27" 4K screen in portrait orientation, that'd be ugly, though. Okay, now let's assume it's a news post or an announcement for something or anything else that isn't about any one picture. The picture is only illustration or decoration. The post itself might actually work without it. In this case, adding an image description to the visible part of the post is bad style IMHO. More so if the image description is actually rather long and goes way into lots of details because it has to do so in order to be sufficiently informative and understandable.

Replies (1)

@richardrathe@universeodon.com 2023-07-24 06:17

@jupiter_rowland I've been mostly offline for ten days, but have the internet again so… The W3C actually has a bunch of how-to and best practice info on their site… https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/ We are both correct in a sense…. Empty alt="" are much more acceptable/preferred than I thought. Basically… text/info in image… summarize in the #AltText. Content of photo is basically described in the body of the post… empty. Image is purely decorative… empty. Image is part of a link or navigation element (or an icon) alt="function of link", etc. So back to my original complaint… sometimes the basic info (like what kind of bird it is) is NOT in the post, but there is extensive info in the alt text. I'm arguing that some of that info be made visible as part of the post. Example… POST: "Hey look at these great birds!" IMAGE ALT TEXT: Full paragraph describing each bird, genus species, location, what they're feeding on, etc. I'm going to stop documenting everything twice!

Open ##2485437