image description
An infographic titled “How To Write Alt Text” featuring a photo of a capybara. Parts of alt text are divided by color, including “identify who”, “expression”, “description”, “colour”, and “interesting features”. The finished description reads “A capybara looking relaxed in a hot spa. Yellow yuzu fruits are floating in the water, and one is balanced on the top of the capybara’s head.”
via https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/
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A capybara in the library with a candlestick.
He was definitely the murderer
1 + 1 + 2 + 1
A true classic
Bro I fucking love capybaras so much
10/10 animal, fucking brilliant.
my favourite animal
the carbonara
I like how “description” is one of the components of the… description.
See also: self referential
goes to dictionary entry for “recursion”
This is excellent, very useful for continuing to make images accessible on the fediverse
Potentially also useful for creating good prompts for AI image generators?
It’s essentially by-hand CLIP, that’s how the training data for CLIP came into being, it was descriptive text for images.
Prompts are just the reverse of image recognition AI tagging stuff.
Alt text is exactly the kind of tedious work that AI would be good at doing, but everyone in the fediverse seems to have a huge hate boner for ANYTHING AI…
Fediverse: write a fucking essay every time you post an image… But make sure you waste time doing it manually, instead of using AI tools!!!
It’s only useful if the AI was trained on similar prompts. A lot of the anime style ones work best with lists of tags, while the realistic ones work best with descriptions like above.
If you have really detailed image tags, a model trained on them can make great outputs.
Me writing alt text: Time is a flat circle. God is a sock.
Reminds me of my git commit messages!
Nothing but crucial intel
Just as important is “decorative images” where you explicitly leave the alt empty https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decorative/
Is this not the kind of thing machine vision/language models would be really good at?
Ignorant question: isn’t alt text primarily for visually impaired people? If so, what is the point of including info about color?
Color can provide useful context. For example, in the case of this image, imagine if in a thread about it there was some discussion of the ripeness of the yuzu fruit.
You can also become visually impaired at points other than birth in life, and know colours and stuff
That’s a very good point!
EDIT: Turns out I totally misunderstood what this graphic was communicating. Thank you Starkstruck for patiently exposing it to me!
ORIGINAL COMMENT:
I don’t like this. It feels like a lot of extra work for little benefit.
That being said I’d love to hear from someone for whom this is helpful. Happy to be wrong.
It’s for blind people
How does color coding alt text help blind people?
Oh geeze you seem to have completely misunderstood the point of this graphic. You’re not supposed to color code your alt text, the color coding is a guide to correspond to the labels at the top. It’s teaching you how to write good alt text, what to include and such.
OH. Yes, if that’s the case I absolutely misunderstood. Wow, the way you describe makes a LOT more sense. Doh 😖
Thanks for helping me understand!
