Alt Text on the Thrediverse

You can add #AltText in both #Lemmy and #Kbin by writing the image description between the brackets

! [Put your alt text here] (url)

Also, when you upload images from your pc on #kbin there’s a text box below (with the words “Imagine alternative text” above it) where you can put your image description.

Other things to take into account to be more accesible to screen reader and TTS software users:

  • Casing of multi-word tags: Always write the first letter of each word on a hashtag containing several word uppercase. This way screen readers and TTS software can interpret and read them as separated words. Otherwise it would read them as one big nonsensical word

#/LikeThis not #/likethis

  • Avoid fancy/special fonts (I’m begging you): special fonts cannot be detected by screen readers and TTS software.
    Most of the time the letters are actually phonetic or mathematical symbols and the software interpret them as such.

  • Emojis are more accessible than emoticons, kaomoji and ASCII ART. Similar to fancy fonts with words, emoticons, koamoji and ASCII art make use of phonetic, mathematical, scientific and punctuation symbols to convey images. These are often read by assistive technology as the separated symbols that form the image, and not as the thing they’re meant to represent. Emojis, on the other hand, have a text name incorporated that can be detected by these kind of software.

  • I don’t think it’s going to be a problem here, but wordle is a nightmare for Screen readers/TTS software as they can’t detect the words and only describe the squares one by one. It’s better to screenshot it and add an explanation of the results in alt text.