still hung up on this attitude i've see claiming that all art should have image descriptions that are as bare as absolutely possible and contain absolutely no details about the contents of the image
listen, when people criticize overly long IDs, it's mostly because that's the general trend on this website, because a lot of people put them in captions and then everyone copies each other's bad habits instead of looking up a real guide. but like, while overly long IDs are bad practice too, the core lesson is not "make a description as short as possible" but "make an image description as relevant as possible". details are therefore necessary depending on the situation, and it's very common for art to be one of those situations
like...okay so, if i show a picture of the mona lisa that isn't intended to have the sighted reader focus on the piece too much - say, i simply drew a clown hat on her and it's a funny joke - then an image description can be, "The Mona Lisa with a clown hat scribbled onto her head." most sighted people will not be peering at the picture to take in the details very much, so the image description doesn't need to go in depth about it either - it can simply note it's a famous painting with a fairly well known subject, who in this particular case has been given a clown hat.
however, a description for a piece of art can absolutely get very wordy! it all depends on the circumstances. let's say i posted this art, which is an officially licensed annihilation movie screen print
maybe i posted this image so that others can appreciate its artistic value. in that case, the image description should absolutely go into details
"An Annihilation movie poster featuring the silhouette of a figure formed out of leaves and blue flowers. A butterfly rests on their shoulder, and a snake winds through their uplifted arms and open hands. The figure's face is empty of vegetation, leaving a blank hole. The word 'Annihilation' spans the entire image, with the letters spaced out and split into 4 even rows of 3 letters each. Smaller text at the bottom reads, 'A film by Alex Garland.'"
could i have just said that it was an annihilation movie poster? yes, and that would be accurate. but that would have made it so that anyone using a screen reader interacting with the post would have had a much worse experience! is that short ID better than nothing? yes, but we should strive for better than "better than nothing", no? at least if vision impaired people are to be treated as members of a community rather than set apart from it
the reason i was annoyed that people would say art shouldn't have an image description that gives any information about the details is that, yeah it's not possible to give every viewer the exact same experience, but to say that blind people can't possibly appreciate something for the same reasons a sighted person might, and therefore don't deserve to appreciate it at all...well, that kind of sucks!
this is also why it's best to describe YOUR own art. you know the image better than anyone else, you know what you wanted the reader to see - after all, you drew it! other people describing images for you will never do as good of a job as you can.
(as a note to the visual reader - the actual alt text i wrote for this image is not the alt text i have shown in plain text above! in fact, it's rather bare bones. why is that? because i gave another image description later in the post, which makes including it in the image redundant. please try to think about what the experience of reading the post would be if you removed all images and replaced them with their alt text! thus, if you post a piece of art, and then spend a long time discussing it in detail, it's okay in that instance to have a very brief description, cause you get to it later. context matters etc etc etc)
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