#I'm never quite sure why people reblog stuff just to tag it as 'undescribed' etc

[wellfine]

Check for Alt Text!

While I'm glad there's a growing awareness for alt text/image descriptions on this site, please check - before you tag something as "undescribed" or add an image description in the caption - that there isn't actually alt text embedded in the image itself.

Tumblr's beta post editor now allows us to add a very generous 4k characters of alt text to images. This allows for more fluidly integrated image descriptions than putting a description in the caption, because they'll be read along with the rest of the post instead of summarised at the end. Also, people cannot delete alt text in a reblog the way they can delete reblogged captions.

I don't know how it goes for every browser, and I'm sure on mobile it's useless, but on Firefox, you can tell which images on Tumblr are using alt text from the little "ALT" infographic which appears in the bottom left corner of each described image. If you hover over this it will light up, and if you click on it, it will display the alt text in plain text. Twitter has also utilised a similar system which does work on mobile, but unfortunately Twitter only allows for 1000 characters of alt text per image, so on that front, Tumblr is much better - if you use it.

Here's a screencap of what the "ALT" infographic looks like on Tumblr, with the left being hovered over by my cursor. In fact since this image itself is also captioned with alt text you should be able to see if it's working on your browser in real time.

Anyway - again, glad we're all more aware of image descriptions now, but if you're tagging things as "undescribed" etc. in case anyone following you with a screen reader would like to filter out those posts, they may potentially be missing accessible posts if you're not checking for alt text. Likewise, if you write a whole new image description in the caption of a post that's already using alt text, a person with a screen reader has to sit through the same/similar descriptions twice.

Also, start using the alt text feature of the beta post editor lmao. As far as social media accessibility tools go this one is pretty good.