Oh yeah. And when there’s an emergency. If you’re in the middle of 25,000 people and there’s a shooting or a fire, and the cell towers are overwhelmed, the alt-text comes through when the image doesn’t.
People with vision impairments use software that reads out the text on the screen; having alt text allows the software to provide a description of the image.
The alt text is also parsed by search, so as a secondary benefit it can make the post easier to find or have it appear in feeds.
In no particular order (they’re all important)
1: It’s how this site indexes images. Alt-text makes images searchable.
2: it permits low bandwidth connections (other countries, in rural areas, emergencies) can connect and get information. When Bsky has to be an emergency hub, bandwidth matters.
3: It allows people with low vision, no vision, and reading disorders to fully participate. Excluding people is bad and ableist.
4: ESPECIALLY FOR TEXT IMAGES (screenshots of the web): it makes those images machine readable. Without alt-text, this image is just a blank to a screen-reader.
Also allows people who've muted terms not to see images of those things, so eg if someone has muted "Musk", an alt-texted photo of Musk would also be hidden.
I guessI am more ignorant than I realized. Now I did a screenshot to show you why it’s good to use, but then it tells me to write in a box describing it. Omg, I have no clue. 🤦🏼♀️
1. Alt text is text that describes an image that is both eyeball readable and machine readable. It’s low-bandwidth, so it can get through network congestion when an image can’t. Demo below, click ALT in LR corner.
2) Open settings, open accessibility, toggle on “require alt text before posting”.
Comments
much easier if there’s text to fall back to.
The alt text is also parsed by search, so as a secondary benefit it can make the post easier to find or have it appear in feeds.
1: It’s how this site indexes images. Alt-text makes images searchable.
2: it permits low bandwidth connections (other countries, in rural areas, emergencies) can connect and get information. When Bsky has to be an emergency hub, bandwidth matters.
4: ESPECIALLY FOR TEXT IMAGES (screenshots of the web): it makes those images machine readable. Without alt-text, this image is just a blank to a screen-reader.
2) Open settings, open accessibility, toggle on “require alt text before posting”.