Alt Text Workshop

... hello, welcome to User:Eleni's and User:Kim's Alt Text Workshop. Kim first came across alt-text in the context of web accessibility a few years ago, but since then finds herself returning to it often, through her interest in writing that happens off-page. Eleni learned about alt-text by using tumblr and her interest in fanfiction. Together we want to explore questions like to what extend can text represent or translate visual media? or How do we deal with expected 'objectivity' of such written representation? and What other shapes or purposes can writing alt-text have?...

What is alt-text?

alternative (alt) text is a textual substitute for non-text content in web pages .

alternative text is the first sucess criteria of the standard called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), stated by the World Wide Web Consortium: (WCAG 2.0 - WCAG 3.0 published a draft 09/2025)

1.1.1 Non-text Content: All non-text content that is presented to the user has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose, except for the situations listed below .

The exceptional situations listed below are: Controls/ Input, Time-Based Media, Test, Sensory, CAPTCHA, Decoration/Formatting/Invisible

alt text is commonly written/ found in the alt attribute of an html img tag. <img src="file.jpg" alt=" ">

disambiguation: alt text & image description are often used interchangeably but have slight destictions: Alt-text is a type of image description, but not all image descriptions are alt-text .

How to write alt-text?

Wikipedia’s style guide offers these questions to ask yourself when you are writing alt-text:

1. Why is this image here?
2. What information is it presenting?
3. What purpose does it fulfill?

the role of context is vital for writing alt text (consider, where is the image embedded?) mediawiki is a good example: alt-text is not saved on file upload but when you embed it in a page.

Why alt-text?

most items in the following list come from this Mastodon post. Lets open the link and try to read the alt text with a screen reader (on MAC: cmd + f5, Windows: Settings -> Accessibility -> Narrator, Linux: Orca )

common arguments pro alt text

screen readers

alt is read out loud to people using tech to speech software

slow internet

alt text will be shown instead of unloaded images

findability

alt text helps to search contents (e.g. in a website)

translation

alt text can be translated (while graphical images that might display text cant be)

disambiguation

descriptive alt text can prevent ambiguity and misunderstanding

important: alt-text ≠ digital accessibility but can be a step towards it. (other steps towards accessibility can be: color contrasts, text sizes, clarity of a page navigation, using semantic html...)

exploitation of alt-text

misuse for search engine optimization

• since alt-text provides text content for images, websites who use alt-text can be better crawled and indexed by search engines - so far so good. This becomes really problematic when the alt attribute of an image is not used to provide a relevant description but only search engine index information such as key words.

extracted / written by ai

• all web-based text content is nowadays extracted to train large language models
• platforms like Instagram provide alt-text written by ai which usually gets the images very wrong.

alt-text on platforms

Different platforms have different approaches to whether and/or how they implement ALT Text to the images. Two examples that highlight this wide range of are Instagram and Tumblr.

Instagram

Instagram gives users the option to provide Alt Text for their posts, hidden under more options. If there is no user-provided Alt Text, the platform automatically generates one with an at-best mediocre outcome.

alt="Photo by Reductress on October 09, 2025. May be an illustration of ‎one or more people, poster, pen and ‎text that says '‎Phew! Art Not AI, Just Authentically Ugly לוע @reductress Roductress‎'‎‎."

Before a certain point that I am not aware of, the generated Alt Text only included the name of the user and date of upload; information that are available to any screen-reader anyway.

Tumblr

Tumblr's approach is quite different from that of Instagram, a more community-oriented one. They urge users to provide Image Descriptions for their photos, by stating that by doing so "...you are making it more accessible for screen reader users.". The ALT Text is then available to be read by regular users as well, by clicking on a clearly indicated button. Some good examples can be found here!!

In addition, many users have taken it upon themselves to provide Image Descriptions for pictures, by adding the text under the post when they reblog.

other ways of alt-texting

to what extend can (or should) text represent visual media? what if we use alt-text not as a forced upon means of content translation or extra labor but as a method to convey situated perspective, emotion, detail? what does it mean to put something into words?

what else can we write alt-text about?

1. Alt Text Selfies
2. alt text for ascii art
3. alt text for a piece of sound or music
4. what could alt-text for a websites be like?
   1. Websites that write about their own process of making and accessibility alt-text as poetry has a section about itself, written by the ones who developed the site, together.net is a consent driven community software that has a whole page dedicated to its own accessibility
   2. wwwwords is a local html publication that experiments with alt text for the 6 most visited websites. The style of writing is more fabulative and visual than purely technical.
   3. I'll meet you on a site: protocolling intersections is the written record of a series of meetings. It was published in Robida 10. part of the writing are alt descriptions of the websites we used as meeting environments. Here is an excerpt, written for Alt Museum

When arriving at 'alt museum' you first see the facade of a building. With its six columns, triangular roof and sand-stone-coloured background it mimics antique temples, a reference drawn across several museum premises until today. Entering the museum reveals a flat, yet abstract room, constructed from geometric shapes. We are facing a wall that instead of showing paintings is crowded with mutely coloured rectangles in different proportions. A brief writing fills each rectangle: alt text. Alt text is usually only readable in the source code as an image description but was here carefully moved into the centre of focus.

what other forms can this writing have?

• Alt Text as Poetry
  
• alt text as a form of preservation or archiving (since image content is more vulnerable to decay: harder to store due to large size and difficult to view with software from different decades)
• could we write alt text that is human but not machine decipherable? (in the means of algorithmic sabotage)

fanfiction

It might be a reach, but during the organization of this workshop, Kim and I (Eleni) spoke about fan-culture events, specifically Reverse Big Bangs, where a fan-artist works on a piece of art and then a writer is called to write a fan-fiction piece inspired by it.

Is the created text some kind of elaborate, fictional Alt Text for the artwork?

Exercise

1. choose a piece static visual media (painting, website, poster, typeface, image (dont be boring), diagram ...)
2. important: dont show what you selected to others yet
3. write alt text for it. while writing, consider what we discussed before:
   1. the role of context
   2. form of writing
4. put your alt text (not the image!) in the collective pool
5. everyone draws an alt text from the collective pool and recreate / interpret the visual media described on it. Here the alt text can work as specific instruction or a more loose prompt to start from. you can use pen and paper or drawing software or code - whatever comes to your mind and feels fitting.
6. In the last step we try to find back which 'original' piece of media and interpretation belong together.

Resources

• alt-text viewer Browser Extensions Firefox / Chrome

Web accessibility guides

• from the W3C WAI
• accessibility developer guide
• wave is a browser based tool to check your websites accessibility

artistic approaches

• Alt Museum
• Alt Text as Poetry Website
• Alt Text as Poetry Workbook (pdf)