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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

If you want to learn how to do accessibility, specifically alt texts, properly, this guy does it exactly right.

I'm a screen reader user and don't encounter those often. There's even some fun in those alt texts, i.e.

"screenshot of unicode character inspector revealing "epic" to actually be "еріс". of course you, a screen reader user, aren't fooled."

Btw, most people would just label that "screenshot", which is extremely infuriating.

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I'm not a screen reader user, but I have ublock origin on my mobile filtering out media elements over 1000kb. Instead I was given the alt texts for at least one of the images. It's great when people do this, so many times I also just get emails from marketing that are images only without any descriptors, and I can't help but think about how many international groups simply don't care about accessibility.

wow I didn't know uBlock could do that!

Does it actually prevent the large media elements from downloading? how?

Presumably by closing the connection based on the Content-Length response header.

Do you have any other tips? I'd love to make my website more accessible, but never really spent much time reading about it. It's allaboutberlin.com.

I regularly use the speech feature of macOS to read web pages aloud to me, so I was also pleasantly surprised to hear meaningful descriptions of the images from the alt text.

Maybe one day computers will be able to describe to me what is in an image without a person having to type it.

This is very slowly happening for some Chrome users. Generating meaningful, accurate descriptions is a general AI task, though.

As an aside, Chrome does the autolabeling (including OCR) only if there's no alt provided, so alts like "screenshot", "photo" etc. actually cause more harm than good.

then you'd miss out on the jokes. or any other more subtle context that is not clear from the picture itself.

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