I have been told by people with visual impairments that it's great if you give a brief summary and then go into as much detail as you wish. Many people love the extra details but those who only want the basics can easily make their screen reader skip the rest of the description.

Thank you, this helps a lot. I want to start providing alt text to my artwork, but I got totally overwhelmed trying to describe every physical characteristic of multiple, non-human fantasy characters! I want to make it a better experience ...

But as always it's more important to hear directly from people who actually rely on ALT instead of getting info secondhand from me so if any screen reader users would like to offer more guidance I would love that!

Oh, and everyone, PLEASE proofread your alt text! I've seen alt text where a key word has been autocompleted into something completely wrong and unrelated, and thought that if I couldn't see the picture, I'd be completely bewildered.

That's a good point.

One nice thing about alt text, is that you can write out the implied point of the image. Sometimes a simple description of an image doesn’t make the meaning clear to someone who may not be fluent in visual iconography.

📌

i’d love to hear from people with screen readers about describing illustrations and comics. illustration is a little easier because it follows similar rules, but writing alt text for comic panels is tricky sometimes, especially when you’re trying to line up the punchline.

i haven't ever done alt text but because of you, i did my first post today of my cat and i with alt text. i am gonna make sure to start doing it. i even turned it on in the settings! thank you

I try to do it as much as possible. but I do wish there was a way to retroactively add it into the post.

I worry about getting too silly with alt text. But I hope I can direct a description like a camera. So hand, forearm, arm and so forth. I managed to hit a daily word count in 4thewords with 1k of description in one figure I wrote about.