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.
I'm on kbin too and I can see the alt text in the raw HTML:
<img src="https://kbin.social/media/cache/resolve/post_thumb/51/85/51859cfc559d9aedfa1bec8e33bbb76fd6c3c6d8b8eaf0ee854a68164df83780.jpg" alt="A machine displaying 108.6 onions per minute. The image is captioned "Tony Abbott's Mouth".">
However, my browser isn't showing me the alt text in the tooltip.
I put alt text in my kbin uploads, but then I couldn't find it later.
I would also like to be able to preview my image as I'm writing the description. I have to keep looking back at my stored one to try to do it well, and I'm failing.
Sounds like a good entry for the issues tracker!
Oh, I was wondering how to report issues. Thanks for that.
But my visibility task is a much lower priority than the one OP describes. They have a lot of stuff going on, and I can wait.
[realizing I want some kind of bookmark feature for this...]
You should report it anyway so it does not get lost. In my experience such low priorities things are often forgotten when there is the time to do them because nobody bothered to report them.
Same for me, that would be nice. That and being able to see the whole thing in paragraph form instead of four words at a time. I've resorted to pre-typing a description into WordPad while I have the image pulled up, and then just copy/pasting it.
Pro tip, hitting enter while typing alt text on kbin will not add a helpful line break like I reflexively want to do, it will submit the unfinished post =_=;;
I've encountered enough websites and programs that do that to have developed a reflex to hit shift+enter pretty much whenever I want to make a linebreak in any text box these days.
The alt text it's not visible (I particularly would prefer if it were), but I've had no problem reading alt text with my TTS app, so, don't worry, it's there.
P.S: Totally agree about the image preview