I’m trying to figure out what works better for alt text accessibility in practice — please reply ONLY if you ever actually use text-to-speech, braille interfaces, or anything similar for accessing the alt text of images.

[0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange]

I’m trying to figure out what works better for alt text accessibility in practice — please reply ONLY if you ever actually use text-to-speech, braille interfaces, or anything similar for accessing the alt text of images. (Boosts welcome.)

If I post a picture of writing in another language — say, Chinese — is it more frustrating to receive an imprecise general alt text like “a picture of Chinese calligraphy”, or for the actual unicode Chinese characters to be present in the alt text and shoved through your TTS? Does that just blast you with a bunch of numbers? Does it silently skip over non-western characters?

My intuition is that the unicode Chinese characters would not be very helpful in this use case unless the user’s computer is already set up for Chinese TTS specifically because they speak a Chinese language, but I figured I should check.

#accessibility #alttext

[bright_helpings@mspsocial.net]

@0xabad1dea Different screenreaders work differently, but if you can include the characters it's best to do so. Mine usually skip symbols they don't recognize (really annoying as a linguistics student!).

But if a summary would be sufficient ("it's a poem about birds" or "it's the name of this person" or whatever) because you're actually sharing the image to talk about the quality of the brushstrokes or the color or whatever, that's fine too.