Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I've been fascinated to watch, first as people discovered alt text at twitter and later at mastodon, how the one point I've seen people be absolutely resistant to learning is that alt text is for describing the image. It's not for:

• punchlines
• sourcing and credits
• metadata
• extra jokes
• full newsy image captions
• information repeated in a visible caption
• excessive interpretation

Not to say alt text can't have flavor (which implies some interpretation). But folks are massively resistant to learning the two vital points about alt text: that its job is to describe the visual image, and that not everyone can access it so you never use it for information everyone should be able to read.

I don't mean resistant to writing alt text that follows that simple guideline. I mean, folks insist on arguing with blind folks and accessibility experts about the purpose.

I have at least some anecdata tying this stubbornness to these two sites with UIs exposing the alt text to sighted users. So this tool that I would have sworn a few years ago would improve alt creation, I think has made sighted image creators think alt is a toy for them.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I remember the debates over userpic title and alt attributes here at dreamwidth. It took a lot of debate to get to the point where understood they were for different audiences and should be constructed differently. (Although, hmph, that seems to have been reverted at some point, I wonder why?)