"In recent years, there has been a rush on the internet to supply image descriptions and to call out those who don’t. This may be an example of community accountability at work, but it’s striking to observe that those doing the most fierce calling out or correcting are sighted people. Such efforts are largely self-defeating. I cannot count the times I’ve stopped reading a video transcript because it started with a dense word picture. Even if a description is short and well done, I often wish there were no description at all. Get to the point, already! How ironic that striving after access can actually create a barrier. When I pointed this out during one of my seminars, a participant made us all laugh by doing a parody: “Mary is wearing a green, blue, and red striped shirt; every fourth stripe also has a purple dot the size of a pea in it, and there are forty-seven stripes—”
“You’re killing me,” I said. “I can’t take any more of that!”
Now serious, she said it was clear to her that none of that stuff about Mary’s clothes mattered, at least if her clothes weren’t the point. What mattered most about the image was that Mary was holding her diploma and smiling. “But,” she wondered, “do I say, Mary has a huge smile on her face as she shows her diploma or Mary has an exuberant smile or showing her teeth in a smile and her eyes are crinkled at the edges?”
It’s simple. Mary has a huge smile on her face is the best one. It’s the don’t-second-guess-yourself option."
--Against Access, by John Lee Clark, a DeafBlind educator
I think this also includes the important idea of imagining the other. Sighted people (like myself) often consider visuals the *most important* part of an experience. This isn't and can't be the case for a blind person. If you don't have sight, then the particulars about the color/expression/etc. aren't necessarily going to be important to you.
Smiling matters because it's an indicator of emotion. The quality of the teeth only matter if it's relevant to the joke. Striped shirt only matters if the text describes it as polka dots and that's the point.
Describe the parts of the image that give context, because a person whose primary mode of interpreting the world is not sight will most likely not want extraneous visual information.
As one of the blind bitches, my best advice for alt text is to lead with the main context in a single sentence summary and get more specific later if it's relevant. Alt text is read in the order it's written: if a summary is short and simple, I can know if it's something I care about listening to the whole of.
"A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge", for example, gives me the subject matter immediately - it's a photo of a cat - and the detail descends from there. Anything else in the image is coincidence or unnecessary; the photo was taken of the cat, and anything else in the frame is unimportant. The reason why the image exists should be in the first two lines - and comedic timing still works in alt text form! "A photo of an orange cat stretched out in the sun on a window ledge. A second cat is falling off a cat tree in the background." still gives that moment of realization that a build up to a joke usually would.
(Defining if it's a real thing or an illustration or a movie scene or whatever is also pretty important for context - "an illustration of a dead dove" is pretty different from "a photograph of a dead dove".)
"A sunny room with a large window and a park outside with children playing in it. There is a wide, sunny windowsill with plants on it and a cat lying next to them, looking outside" describes the same hypothetical image, but the order of it changes the importance; while it would work to establish a scene in fiction (well, clumsily worded fiction, at least) it's missing the point as alt text - the cat's the reason the photo was taken, but everything else gets described first!
I'm no expert, nor do I intend to speak for Everyone With Vision Loss Ever, but as endemiccharm said, unless the details are relevant to why the image exists, they're probably not necessary to mention! Get Shorter.
All of this!
I am also totally blind, and frankly do not care what kind of shirt someone is wearing unless it is relevant to the surrounding post. Tell me what's relevant, keep it as brief as possible.
I know there are circumstances in which it is more likely that you do more in-depth descriptions, such as, for example, comic panels, and of course there are the alt-text transcriptions of screenshots containing tweets or text from articles or the like. But if describing a photo, or an illustration, unless more detail is required, keep the thing brief. We want to understand the post and move on, not get bogged down in meaningless details.
