crossposted from https://wandering.shop/@meredithw/113983437672884349
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Microblog Memes
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Are there any blind people on Lemmy, screenreading this? I get why alt-text is useful functionally on things like application interfaces, and instructive or educational text, but do you actually enjoy hearing a screen reader say "A meme of four oanels. First panel. An image of a young man in a field. He is Anakin Skywalker as played by that guy who played Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. He says 'bla bla bla'. Next frame. An image of a young woman. She is Padme as played by Natalie Portman. She is smiling. She says "bla bla bla, right?"
the question is do you need at least one blind person to justify alt text or do you want the alt text to make it possible for blind people or people with impaired vision to enjoy if they ever stumble upon it?
I think they simply dont want to waste their time. Its a legitimate question, comes up with handicapped regulations on physical businesses too, although that usually costs money and time.
oh what an inconvenience... I wish I was blind so I didn't have to spend 4 more minutes transcribing 20 words on a meme.
even if you think it's a waste of time, I didn't even comment on the validity of the question. I just gave them the actual consideration they should have.
oh and even if you completely ignore accessibility on that front, transcribing images makes them infinitely more searchable. no one knows what a title would be, people usually don't put anything helpful or something you can remember. but if you know some of the words you might be able to find it.
it's like finding songs by searching lyrics from a random part of the song you heard or remember. it would be so much harder if you had to know the title.
There's also the element of wasting the blind person's time. I work in enterprise software and our application meets WCAG guidelines but... it's a busy, text-heavy, actions-heavy application. It can take 5 minutes for a screen reader to read the entire page. Other websites are worse - images as buttons, flavour images and hero banners and icons everywhere. Again, a much more accessible version is just presenting them with what they actually want - a cleaner, leaner, more contextual page like the ones we built in the 90s before images loaded instantly.
So part of me wonders if blind people actually enjoy "listening to memes" or if they'd rather skip it and hear a text-based joke or an audio/video joke. I did specifically say I wanted a blind person's opinion on it.
I think you've underestimated the wordcount and I think you don't get how memes are shared if you think adding 4 minutes to their re-transmission wouldn't matter. I cars that blind people enjoy the internet but I absolutely do not think "searchability" is a good reason to transcribe "Drake meme but it's an animal girl. Top panel. Animal girl looking repulsed. The item she is repulsed by is the logo of a Linux package manager called Flatpak..."
I specifically said searchable referring to images in general, not memes. I don't think people search memes that often.
i also didn't specify verbosity. Blind people are people, idk why we're talking like they're a different species. Whether or not you should alt text an image is directly related to whether or not you consider that image part of the content.
a meme is the content, when someone is looking at a post that's what they're looking at and reading. if someone wouldn't want to read it they can stop reading as soon as they see that it's a meme. if they want to read it they can keep going.
so no, I don't think meme transcriptions should be as verbose. so it's just "animal girl is repulsed by flatpak". you're explaining it to people who don't see as well, not people who were born yesterday.