Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
As well as making something accessible for users that might otherwise have difficulty, it also makes image content more searchable, so you might benefit yourself from it one day.
Every time someone posts a wall of text as an image, or a meme with poor contrast text, or some random image that can only be interpreted on a 4k screen, rather than a mobile phone.
Aside from sight-challenged people, there are also the ones that don't speak the language of the meme/photo. You can take the text and paste it into an automated translator, with a meme it's harder to do. That's particularly important with memes that have slang/jargon/regional content.
Yes, my ability to process text is much better than my ability to process an image. This is best practice for a reason.
I sometimes have trouble reading the text in the image. Then I am glad to have the alt text.
It definitely helps blind people who have to browse with screen readers.
Rarely. Almost always, when I see those transcriptions, the text on the image is well readable. In cases where the text is awful, there are no transcriptions.
It'll benefit some people who are blind. It will also benefit search engines and AI scrapers as you give context for the image. Whether that is good or bad is up to you.
Even if most of the time they might not benefit anyone, it takes like 30 seconds tops to add one so why wouldn't we. They can also be easily generated with AI, one of the actually useful use cases for it.
There's a lot of comments in here saying, "it helps the blind community", but not a single comment that says, "I'm blind and it helps me".
I don't doubt that it would help, but might be one of those "we should do X for Y" cases where X isn't really benefitting Y in a meaningful way.