Social Networks – Page 2 – Starship Changeling

It’s a good thing when any website offers options beyond the binary when they ask for gender. When sites within a smaller community such as the kind made by blindness or any other shared disability by people, it’s even better. Blind Bargains did this in their most recent survey to collect feedback about their podcast. When I tweeted my pleasure at this discovery, I received a reply from one of my followers that RS Games, a site that offers accessible board and card games for people with visual impairments, now gives its players the option to identify as nonbinary. As a long time player of RS Games, I can tell you this is a major relief after years of having to go by “it” because I refused to choose either of two options when playing. If you know of any other blindness related sites that are promoting this sort of inclusion, please post them in the comments ection below, or mention them to me on Mastodon or Twitter. You can also use the contact form in the navigation menu at the top of this page to send an email if you want to keep yourself private. This way, we can make sure everyone gets the credit they deserve and promote inclusion. Thank you in advance.

Introduction

Posting pictures is something we do every day. Maybe it’s a cute outfit you’re child’s wearing. It could be a ginormous sandwich you’re having for lunch. Possibly, it’s a cloud you truly think looks like a dinosaur. No matter what it is, the process usually goes something like this.

Take the picture or pictures.
Call up the share sheet on your mobile device, and choose your social network.
- Insert your commentary with appropriate hashtags, and hit the post button.
Wait for likes and comments.

Most people who go through this process miss a step. That step is adding a description (also known as alternative or alt text) to the photo. If you’re reading this post, it’s probably because you have decided that you want to be adding alt text (descriptions) to your photos, and you want to make them as effective as possible for people viewing your posts. In other words, you’ve typed very specific search terms into the search engine of your choice because this is something you’re actively looking for. If this isn’t the case, and you’re just learning about alt text for the first time, don’t worry. Here is a page that offers a summary of what alternative text is, how to add it to photos, and includes other tips for making sure your content is as accessible to your audience as possible. Since I don’t believe in rehashing content that is already available and well-written, I’m going to assume that you’ve either read the page I’ve just linked to, or that you’ve at least done your research into the platform you’ve chosen to use to find out what it offers for adding descriptions to your pictures. With that said, I’ll be talking about the experience I had that made me realize why most people never think to add descriptions to their photos, describe two benefits to doing so, and talk about the following two rules, which are actually more like guidelines, for making your descriptions as effective as possible:

Be as concise and detailed as possible.
Adjust your description according to your purpose and audience.

Why Aren’t People Describing Their Photos?

Remember the process I said you go through to share your photos? More specifically, remember the step that references the share sheet on your mobile device? Here’s what I found out while researching platforms to share my own experiences with photography. When you choose a photo from your mobile device and use the share sheet to post it, the option to add alternative text or a description for the photo isn’t available. This is true even if the platform in question gives users the ability to include this information with their posts when made through the website or app for that platform. This means that people are not always making the decision to not include descriptions with their photos, but rather that they are not being given the choice at all because they’re taking the most user friendly and direct route to sharing their content.

Again, if you’re reading this, it’s because you’ve decided that including descriptions with your photos is something you should and want to do. You have your own reasons and you want to make sure you’re being effective. If you’re still making that decision, or just in case you like to be reminded that taking the extra steps to add descriptions is worth it, the next section describes two benefits of this process.

Two Benefits to Adding Descriptions to Your Pictures

The first benefit to adding descriptions by using alternative text to your pictures is that it makes your content accessible to everyone, including viewers with visual impairments. With the increasing adoption rate by large technology companies of universal design, more visually impaired people than ever have access to the Internet and its content. In a digital world where descriptions of photos are desired but not largely available, you can stand out as a person who is aware of the different needs of others and/or technologically savy just by taking the extra steps to add alternative text to your photos. You’re also making your content more accessible to search engines.

If you take a few seconds to think about it, you’ll realize making sure your photos have appropriate descriptions can make it easier for people to find your content. Search engines provide results based on the text a user types into the search box. While it is possible to filter results to images, those images are found based on the text in the search box. In other words, describing your images lets the search engine properly index them and lead people to your content. With these things in mind, let’s talk about how to make sure the descriptions are as effective as possible.

Be Detailed and Concise

Most people tend to think the title of image is enough of a description. I like dragons, and I tend to use them for examples when I can. The original title of this picture is “Baby Dragon”. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, and we’re only using two to describe it, it should be immediately clear that something important is being left out. For starters, “baby dragon” can mean a lot of things.It could mean a dragon just hatched, it could mean a small, not yet vicious dragon that someone thinks they can tame, or it could and does mean that it is a small dragon on its trainer’s arm, ready to hunt. What’s important is that we, the ones posting the picture make sure to provide the relevant details in as few words as possible. The way this is done depends on the content that is being posted.

For example, if the content is a meme, both text and details of the picture should be included in the alt text. Similarly, if the picture is all text, something that occurs on both Twitter and Instagram, the text of the picture needs to be included in the alt text. This allows our audience to have quick access to the information. This also means that people in the photo who are an important part of the photo should be identified, and that screen shots should include descriptions of the important parts of the screen. This last is especially true if you are posting how-to articles so viewers can make sure they’re on the correct step in the guide.

In regard to being concise, a lot can be done simply by not repeating details that are in the text of your post. For example, if your post text says, “Lovely night at the beach” and your picture is of the beach at nighttime, you can leave “beach” and “night” out of the description, and spend more time describing the other elements like the colors of the sunset or how much moon is visible.

Adjust Your Description according to your Purpose and Audience

While you were choosing a platform to share your content, I imagine an important step for you was figuring out which of them would be most accessible to your intended audience. I chose WordPress because it lets me build a website I know is accessible to people who use screen readers, people don’t need an account to read my stuff, and I can post my posts to other social networks. We go through a similar process when describing photos.

I described the baby dragon just by saying “a baby dragon,” but I did not include details like color. As a dragon enthusiast who interacts with other dragon enthusiasts, I can tell you that a lot of significance is placed on the color of the dragon, as well as whether it is Western, Eastern, or Celtic, as this distinction indicates physical characteristics we would expect to find. For the record, the dragon used to start this section is a Western-style dragon, a detail I left out in the alt text. How much detail and what details are necessary will largely depend on who you want to reach.

If you’re posting detailed computer how-tos with screenshots, you’ll probably want to include the name of the screen you’re on, the available options, and any messages that appear if the screenshot is of a result from a single action or series of actions so that someone following the steps in your guide can compare their results. If you’re an artist communicating with other artists, you will likewise need to adjust the level of detail in your descriptions the folks over at mastodon.art have this down to a science.

Conclusion

This post described a reason as to why people don’t add alternative text (descriptions) to photos they upload, the benefits of doing so, and two guidelines for making the descriptions meaningful to the intended audience. Just like any other rules, there are exceptions. There are computer programs that provide descriptions of photos based on complex formulas, but said formulas still don’t always manage to adjust for context to communicate the best meanings behind a picture. Until the day when machines can accurately interpret context, it’s up to us to make sure we’re providing quality descriptions.

The General Idea

For those of you who don’t know, this site is mostly about my goal of becoming a blind photographer. I decided that the first step I should take was to train myself to interact with pictures. Places like Twitter are rich with pictures of all kinds, and I always spent my energy ignoring them unless they had descriptions, an occurrence that is rare going on nonexistent. It is one of those situations where the world wasn’t going to change unless I did. So, just in case you missed my blurb about it on the home page, I began using Seeing AI to analyze pictures.

I almost Overdid It

Let’s face it, folks. Not every picture that gets posted on social media is interesting, just like not every chicken strip is nice and crispy. After fifty or sixty selfies, cat pics, memes, etc., the process of analyzing each picture gets BORING!!! If you’re one of the people whose selfies I ran cross, don’t take it personally. I just overdid things, and analyzing pics went from being a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon to something a little too close to working in a processing center. If I was going to keep working toward my goal, I needed to make sure I had a reason to keep going. That reason, as it turns out, is the same one that encourages people to share pictures in the first place–the social benefits of sharing your experiences.

Building an Interactive Road to That First Milestone

At the same time I decided to start this thing, I was also becoming involved with Mastodon, another microblogging service. I could go on and on about the differences between it and Twitter, but the main one is that the culture on Mastodon supports every kind of social group you can imagine, including but not limited to aspiring blind photographers. The process was simple. I requested that people could send me pics, I would analyze them, and try to guess what the picture was. If I got it right, everyone went away happy. If not, the person had to tell me what the picture was, and then we could have a good laugh over the errors of computers. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last month or so. That, and programming friends into my camera for future use, a process I will describe in a future post. For now, I’m continuing to interact with people and their pics, and it has two results. First, it keeps me interacting with photos, and keeps me engaged. Second, it raises awareness of how AI helps people, and gives people an idea of how to describe their pictures when they post them, a topic I will also cover in a future post.

What’s the Next Step?

The next step is to get myself used to incorporating emojis into my self-expression. A picture is worth a thousand words, and emojis are just little pictures, aren’t they? Maybe I’ll write an entire post in emojis.