#stoprockvideo

[pokemon-npcs]

[a-captions-blog]

sending this in response to the ask about shorter descriptions—take this with a grain of salt as i am sighted, this is just what i've picked up from spending some time writing descriptions myself following guidelines from other web accessibility sources outside tumblr.

while i can't find any sources on "industry standard" descriptions being ten words or fewer specifically (i did see fifteen from one source, though,) i do see that alt text should generally be around 200 characters at the most, as alt text should be concise and give just enough detail to understand the image clearly while not including anything that isn't vital to that understanding. some screenreaders aren't compatible with alt text that goes over that limit.

however, a lot of what you do on this blog is outright transcriptions, which isn't quite the same. aside from that, what most people (including you) who write descriptions on here are writing are long descriptions, which are intended for describing images in more depth than alt text and aren't meant to be concise in the same way. i think part of the problem is that people on this website tend to use "image description" synonymously with "alt text," implying that alt text and long descriptions should work the same way and aren't made with distinct (though related) goals in mind.

on websites outside of tumblr, long descriptions are usually used for images containing lots of vital information like charts and graphs, in conjunction with a short description in alt text—the alt says something like "a chart showing (general data)," and the long description provides the specific information, sometimes linked on another page or put in a collapsible menu so that the user can choose to access it. on tumblr however, especially when you're not the original poster of something, i don't know what a good equivalent to this practice would be. you could always warn at the beginning of a description that it is meant to be a detailed/long description or a transcription of lots of text.

image description guidelines are also not the same as guidelines for describing audio or video. this isn't something i do as much as image description, so i don't have any specific knowledge about it, but i'd keep that in mind too.

i don't mean to come off as contrarian to that anon (because i think their criticism is justified and i'm open to correction if there's something about their perspective i'm missing,) or condescending towards you (as i'm sure you probably know some of this already, being a caption blog,) i just thought i'd provide some context i don't see often that might help you figure out what you want to do with your captions ^_^b (happy thumbs-up emoticon).

[Previous ask for context.] Hello! Thank you for your input. The difference in purpose between alt text and long descriptions makes sense to me, and I have some non-Tumblr experience with video transcriptions that I try to apply here as well. I do agree with the previous anon that my descriptions for art and such tend to be a bit verbose, so I can definitely work on trying to capture the general essence of the piece rather than every minute detail. I think I will go with the idea of putting a pre-description for longer captions that are as concise as possible and mention that the following description is lengthy. I will also add the ‘long description’ tag moving forward in case people want to block that pre-emptively. I am also open to further discussion on this if anyone (especially screen reader users) wants to comment :] (rectangular smiley)