Ugh, making accessible plain text into inaccessible images. As a blind person I really hate this.
It would be cool if there was a way to copy paste the text easier.
Like, just using text? Maybe even send it through a syntax highlighter first?
I can't be the only one that was irked at Amazon for spending years making their product promo pages or prominent buttons as hard-coded images instead of text. Horribly inaccessible, over the top, looks terrible on HiDPI devices, looks terrible on a non-Mac because it was clear that their designers were using OS X font rendering, so it looked totally inconsistent.
My favorite part is being on mobile and having to scroll left and right to see the image, or the image has been fit-to-scale is flatly impossibly too small to read.
I feel stodgy, but this entire effort is annoying. Just like the stupid GIFs on project READMEs that play too slow or too fast and have to be watched 50 times to grasp what's going on. Meanwhile asciinema exists and is superior in every way (seekable, pausable, text-selectable, etc).
tarboreus, what's your experience with alt text for this kind of thing?
In a related manner, I'd actually be curious to hear in general about other things we do/don't do that makes life more difficult for blind people on the web.
By my understanding (as a sighted person who has relatively zero experience using such features) alt text is for short pieces of text that might aid in communication of an image to a blind person. I have even less understanding on whether or not dumping a chunk of code in there would be at all useful, and I expect very few sighted persons would know better. Hence my complaint, and hence my question.
"The alt text should be the most concise description possible of the image’s purpose. If anything more than a short phrase or sentence is needed, it would be better to use one of the long description methods discussed in complex images."
The alternatives for long descriptions are the "longdesc" attribute, "figure" with "figcaption" tag or the "aria-describedby".
In short, if the image has alt text, it's fine. But this seems likely to be used in ways that mean uploads without alt text.
Paintings, and Prints, tend to take real world subjects and artistically adapt their native format into a 2d perspective.
This transformation typically removes fidelity oringinally found in the subject. Eg, you can't (or shouldn't) eat a painting of an orange, nor could one typically feel the texture of an orange via a painting.
Alternatively there may be some benefits to the transformation. I'm not sure but in this case one may be able to display more content via the image on Twitter, then transmitted via the oringinal text format due to tweet length "string" hard limits vs image size limitations.