i am once again reminded of people massively misusing alt text to the point that it is actively harmful

fuck you especially if you shout at people about alt text and do not actually know how they work or even have ever used a screenreader for more than 5 mins

@twinkle got any specific tips?

@ThrowawayAI

• alt texts should not have line breaks. alt texts are read as an “inline” piece of text (i.e. HTML span, or literally “in line”) and not as a “block” text (i.e. a Block of text), because images are inline elements. it is inappropriate to have newlines then because browsers and non-visual readers expect them to be inline elements. this still applies even if you set CSS display: block.
• screenreaders already announce “image”, avoid any words that merely indicate it’s an image unless it’s a more specific word (drawing, illustration, photo, etc)
• remember that alt text isn’t just used by screenreaders. it also replaces images while they’re loading/when they can’t load (e.g. someone intentionally disabling images to reduce data usage), and it should be written in a way to be “the text alternative” for an image.
• avoid long alt texts in general. break it up into replies or put it in the post itself. this is once again because images are inline elements and alt texts are read as a single line, and screenreaders may or may not break the line up to allow multiline reading of the alt text
• do not put links in alt texts, strictly forbidden. in fact do not put anything but English/your target language either, don’t put emojis don’t put anything that isn’t “proper text”. links will not be read as links and will instead be read as h t t p s colon forward slash forward slash mastodon dot social forward slash (…, unintelligible garble because it’s machine generated post ids) because I’ve been splurted at like that before.
• if you don’t have anything good to say for the image, just don’t add an alt text. nothing is better than worthless meaningless text scribbles.