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What is the best way to use alt text to summarise screenshots of text? (self.Blind)
submitted by ego_sum_machina
Say I wanted to share a screenshot of some highlighted text from a longer passage. I have a few questions regarding how I should format the alt text to make such a screenshot screen reader friendly.
1) Should I preface the alt text by giving the context of the screenshot, or go straight into describing the text?
2) Should I paraphrase the highlighted text to save characters, or is it better to quote it directly?
3) If I am quoting directly, should I use quotation marks to indicate this? Would it be better to write quote and unquote around the text to avoid using punctuation? Do you prefer another solution?
I appreciate any and all thoughts 😃
1) Should I preface the alt text by giving the context of the screenshot, or go straight into describing the text?
2) Should I paraphrase the highlighted text to save characters, or is it better to quote it directly?
3) If I am quoting directly, should I use quotation marks to indicate this? Would it be better to write quote and unquote around the text to avoid using punctuation? Do you prefer another solution?
I appreciate any and all thoughts 😃
zersiax 4 points 1y ago
If you can at all, it's probably better to work with figCaption instead and just stick the text in there verbatim. Failing that, you could just stick the entirety of the text into the alt text, no need to preface it with anything. You could do something like "screenshot of the text: blah" if you want to be verbose, given there's not 60 graphics like that I don't think anyone would have an issue with that :)
ego_sum_machina [OP] 1 points 1y ago
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! :)
AutomaticChair9 2 points 1y ago
I would be careful about adding too much text as "alt" text. Some screen readers might cut off after a certain number of characters or - in the case of an image not loading properly - the user might only be able to see the small amount of text that shows up in the space the image should occupy. I think the idea of adding text in a caption is good, or you could add a "long description", depending on how you are sharing this image (social media, in a document, on a website). The $1 at the University of Washington has additional information about alt text.
ego_sum_machina [OP] 2 points 1y ago
Thank you for your advice and the link, that's precisely the kind of guidance I was looking for.
MostlyBlindGamer 1 points 1y ago
Alternative text is meant to be a functional replacement for an image. Think "what is this an image of?"
Real text would be far more useful, in this case, because any reader can select it, zoom in without loss of quality, change the font to adapt to their needs and preferences, etc.
You can't easily pause a screen reader when going over alt text or to line by line or check the spelling of a word. As a rule of thumb, if you're alt text is going to be longer than a Tweet, you're writing an image description instead, which can be added after the graphic.
As you intuitively realized, screen readers do not typically announce formatting or some symbols, like quotes.
Example:
[Screenshot of text. Description with highlights follows.]
Text post on Reddit: something something. Highlight: this and that.
Real text would be far more useful, in this case, because any reader can select it, zoom in without loss of quality, change the font to adapt to their needs and preferences, etc.
You can't easily pause a screen reader when going over alt text or to line by line or check the spelling of a word. As a rule of thumb, if you're alt text is going to be longer than a Tweet, you're writing an image description instead, which can be added after the graphic.
As you intuitively realized, screen readers do not typically announce formatting or some symbols, like quotes.
Example:
[Screenshot of text. Description with highlights follows.]
Text post on Reddit: something something. Highlight: this and that.
ego_sum_machina [OP] 2 points 1y ago
Thank you for the advice, it's really helpful :)
MostlyBlindGamer 1 points 1y ago
No problem. I'm happy to go into this kind of detail when somebody is clearly eager to learn and looking for best practices, instead of a quick fix.
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