The only advice I've seen for image descriptions is to keep them free from bias. So describing a picture as "a gray cat sitting on a red chair" is fine, but "a beautiful gray cat sitting on an ugly red chair" isn't, because the second one inserts the captioner's bias into the description.
Which is so interesting, because bias is sometimes a part of the message -- like, if the joke of the post is how ugly the chair is, that’s context that helps the post make sense.
The responses to the question of what is helpful/unhelpful in an image description were super interesting, I must say. Quite a few people, even people with visual impairments, talked about disliking image descriptions -- acknowledging that they were necessary and not wanting to get rid of them, but having visceral dislike or cringe reactions to them, not wanting to see or read them. I suspect this might in part because it’s a really high-profile disability accommodation, so it can come off as rather crass virtue signaling even when it isn’t, and also because if you can see the image and/or don’t care about it, it’s a reiteration of something you already didn’t care about.
Also one person brought up how some people don’t want any text on any image posts ever, which made me lol and remember the time I dared to do an RDJ Advises on someone’s photo post and they said if I ever did it again they’d reblog every post I did from then onwards with the comment “You’re a fucking idiot” as if them wasting hours of their time was some kind of threat and not just hilarious.
There’s a conflict that the ask above is a part of, I think, in that common advice seems to be that you should be unbiased and clinical in the interest of being factual, while most people commenting actually appreciated my descriptions because they are narrative and focus on key points rather than a complete description of the image. But again, as far as I know most commenters or askers are speaking as fully sighted people. If you do use a screen reader I would love to hear your preferences. (And this is one time I will open up the askbox -- if you’re a screen-reader user and don’t want to talk about that under your own name for whatever reason but would like to contribute, feel free to send an ask about it.)
The third thing I saw in commentary was that there’s a lot of difference in the order in which things go -- some people prefer image - description - text, like you’d have in a newspaper or magazine, while some prefer image - text - description, because that doesn’t separate the image from the accompanying commentary.
Between this and the discussion of the eating-in-total-darkness restaurant from a few weeks ago, in which some people were super uncomfortable with the idea and the restaurants themselves talk about how people have varying levels of discomfort with being unsighted when usually they aren’t, it’s been a lot to think over. Especially since I also just learned that the blind and visually impaired have one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country, which some states have addressed by prioritizing visually impaired applicants for state jobs (Ear Hustle just did an episode called Hot Garbage which in part discussed how most prison vending machines in California are maintained by blind or visually impaired people.) The loss of vision is a much more sensitive nerve in the human psyche than I ever considered or suspected.
