Alt text is something I'm personally very interested in.
Websites, and the experience of personalized computing as a whole, have really improved in leaps and bounds, particularly in the last couple of years.
I know screen readers and alt text itself is relatively new, but the texts written in those alt text brackets seems as dictionary plain and about as interesting to a non technical person as a technical document.
Understandably not every user of a screen reader is visually impaired but surely more descriptive language with more emotive concepts can be established as a standard to move toward from the current technical labelling that is equivalent to the rest of the coding file it's written in.
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Alt text is supposed to convey the intent of the image. If it's a piece of art, then a description of the art might suffice, but depending on the target audience it could be more like, "oil on canvas, heavy on the browns and golds, sombre and moody" or "a cow in a field on an overcast day". I know these aren't technical or code-type examples, but I'm trying to get across that it's not always obvious what the description should be.
Alt descriptions were in the original HTML spec at least as far back as 1993, so I'm not sure about the concept being "relatively new"... and the concept of assistive technology predates HTML.
It's new in places like Twitter and Instagram, which are giant projects with absolutely no excuse for having omitted basic accessibility for most of their existence. Bad companies. No biscuit for them.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for your response.
Ok I understand what you're saying, I need to do more research and investigate it further but thank you for confirming that it would be worthwhile.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
Alt text is something I'm personally very interested in.
Websites, and the experience of personalized computing as a whole, have really improved in leaps and bounds, particularly in the last couple of years.
I know screen readers and alt text itself is relatively new, but the texts written in those alt text brackets seems as dictionary plain and about as interesting to a non technical person as a technical document.
Understandably not every user of a screen reader is visually impaired but surely more descriptive language with more emotive concepts can be established as a standard to move toward from the current technical labelling that is equivalent to the rest of the coding file it's written in.
Alt text is supposed to convey the intent of the image. If it's a piece of art, then a description of the art might suffice, but depending on the target audience it could be more like, "oil on canvas, heavy on the browns and golds, sombre and moody" or "a cow in a field on an overcast day". I know these aren't technical or code-type examples, but I'm trying to get across that it's not always obvious what the description should be.
Alt descriptions were in the original HTML spec at least as far back as 1993, so I'm not sure about the concept being "relatively new"... and the concept of assistive technology predates HTML.
It's new in places like Twitter and Instagram, which are giant projects with absolutely no excuse for having omitted basic accessibility for most of their existence. Bad companies. No biscuit for them.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for your response.
Ok I understand what you're saying, I need to do more research and investigate it further but thank you for confirming that it would be worthwhile.