Imagine yourself sitting on a bench outside of a tall office building. You see a crowd of people enter and exit the building.
Every now and then you see a person in a wheelchair come up to the door. But it’s not a very accessible building, for some reason. If you’re in a wheelchair, you need someone to open the door for you and hold it while you wheel yourself inside.
Inexplicably, nobody’s holding the door for the person in the wheelchair.
So you get up, walk to the door, and you hold it open.
You return to the bench. But now there’s a few people in wheelchairs waiting at the door. You’re a bit confused, why’s nobody willing to hold the door? Why is everyone in so much rush?
As you get up, someone does decide to hold the door and folks can finally enter.
And this goes on, all day. Every day. It’s puzzling. And after a while, irritating. And that’s how I feel when I see people post images on social media without a proper description.
Instead of yelling at people for being careless and arrogant on social media, I decided to praise those who do take a moment of their time to help those in need. And that’s how Alt Text Hall of Fame came to be.
I wanted the project to serve as a positive inspiration to show folks that a few seconds of their time spent on describing an image they’re posting on social media can mean so much to someone.
Just wanted to thank all in this instance for adding image descriptions. To a totally blind person like me it means a lot to have a picture in my mind of your images, especially the animal pics.
I just want to say for my first post to the #Fediverse that I’ve already seen more #alttext in the last couple of days than I’ve literally seen in my entire life. I don’t know what it is, but as a blind user it’s making me emotional to be able to actually interact with content. Think I’ll write an introduction soon.
#accessibility#Mastodon#redditMigration
I don’t know how to convince people that Black lives matter, or that love is love, or that trans rights are human rights. But I figured, maybe I can at least do something about image descriptions on social media, that should be easy. It’s the blind, everyone has to agree that we ought to help the blind. Right?
Well, it turns out it’s a little bit harder than I expected. But I guess I’m sticking to this because it should be easy. This should be an easy fight to win, so if we can’t do this, together, then what chance do we have about everything else that’s so much harder to achieve?
Header image credit: Asmakar via Adobe Stock.