i’ve never really known whether or not this kind of silly commentary in my alt text is good or bad or useless, but i almost always do it. i feel like, worst case it adds nothing, best case it provides some extra/fun context for people who rely on screen readers or people who just decide to do the extra bit of digging?
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💬 Replies (8)
@davidcelis you probably already know this and I’m being wooooshed, but a11y guidance is usually to omit stuff like “a picture of…” because assistive technology already gives that bit of context.
@davidcelis (I like the extra bonus commentary though)
@mdesjardins ohhhh that's good to know 😅 i did wonder if i was being redundant by doing that. can the same be said about starting with "a screenshot of…" though? i'm actually not sure if it's ever helpful context to say if the image is a screenshot rather than a photo, but i've been doing it habitually
@davidcelis honestly that’s a very good question! I don’t know if AT is good enough to tell the difference between a photo and a graphic yet! I used to be a bit of an a11y nerd back when I did web development, I’m sure my knowledge would be stale at this point anyway. :/
@mdesjardins i'm looking back through all of the ones i typed and i don't think a single one was improved by starting with "A screenshot of". despite typing that out, the following phrase was already always enough to communicate what you'd be looking at. i'm gonna edit it out of them 😂
@davidcelis @mdesjardins yeah I err on the side of clarifying that, I try to avoid just “image” but is it a screenshot, a photograph, a diagram, etc. seems like useful information and nobody’s complained 😸
@davidcelis I’m not a person who’s consuming captions but I like the little bit of whimsy and personality 😊