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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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
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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?
This! I often hear certain restaurants don't have ramps because disabled people don't eat there. And we don't because there's no ramp.
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.
If an uncaptioned tree falls in the woods without any blind people around...
Its a genuine question: how much enjoyment does someone with a visual impairment get from a meme that's purely a visual gag? You could go through a lot of work to make a cliff face wheelchair accessible but it will never be the same experience as rock climbing
Blindness is a spectrum! So for example, someone could maybe make out the stick figure shape in a comic but not the speech bubbles. Most blind people can still see things but it greatly helps to have things read out as an aid to quite literally see the whole picture :)
And now I wanna try rock climbing as a wheelchair user just because, lol
Very fair point 👉
your analogy makes no sense, and neither does your argument.
first of all the purpose of making places wheelchair accessible is to make it possible for people in wheelchairs to go there, not to give them "the experience" whatever the fuck that is supposed to be.
like, what do you even know what the wheelchair experience is like, and what makes you think what people in wheelchairs want is the experience of rock climbers, rather than the ability to experience something themselves? have you ever seen an interpreter sign a rap song? what do you think that's for? to stimulate hearing?
second of all, memes are rarely "purely visual" gags. I don't even know what makes you even think that. because they're in an image format? you do realize a woman staring at her boyfriend who's checking out another woman is in no way a visual gag, right? it's not about how they look, it's what they're doing.
or, to argue on a more basic level, if it's purely visual why does it have fucking words?
I do alt text on my image posts, especially OC content as I find it's a curb cutting effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect
I'm not the only person in a rural area who has internet access, and sometimes the alt text is enough to convey the joke/image than the image itself.
Plus I find it a fun test of my vocabulary to use the words I need to explain the joke/image. Sometimes I don't know the right words and I learn a new one.
When the instance hosting the image dies the alt text stays so I can still read the old posts even if image is long gone into enthropy.
alt text is a part of the post quality like any other