Recently, I attended “Art for Alt Text and The Pedagogy of Description.” The workshop is part of Alt Text as Poetry, a project by Bojana Colklayt and Finnegan Shannon that explores poetics as a starting point for accessibility, and was based on their workbook. 

Shannon highlighted that many people first think of accessibility for people with visual disabilities; however, they are not the only population that benefits from alt text. For example, individuals with ADHD can use screen readers as a tool to focus. 

Alt text has more to it. It can also allow access in cases of low internet connection if people turn off their images in the email or browser. Shannon commented that alt text has also been used for search engine optimization, a process used for marketing by placing keywords.

The workshop revolved around creating alt text for artwork images. It was a challenge. We started with the prompt to describe the image to a person who cannot see it. Here, we focused on how objectivity is not the goal. In Shannon’s experience, we have to center positionality to allow readers to understand what kind of relationship we are creating with the image. They said, “With a description, you learn as much about the description as you learn about the object that is described.” The same applies to alt text; the difference is that the latter needs to be short (we don’t want to insert an entire composition for one image!), and it has to respond to the context where the image appears. 

I loved how the workshop approached writing alt text in the same hierarchy as any other writing practice. Shannon mentioned how we can think of the different genres of alt text. One of the overarching questions was what happens if you need to describe a cartoon, a joke, or a meme vs what happens in the description of a concept map that is part of an academic paper?

Ethics surrounding alt text

Sighted people are used to seeing images while reading. This process happens in the blink of an eye, so we usually don’t realize how much information is gathered from the relationship between text and images. Multimodal text analysts have been working on understanding the relationships between different meaning-making resources (such as text, images, audio, colors, gestures, etc.); a big focus has been on text-image relationships. They have seen how images can be used to extend meaning, give specific examples, and make abstract information more concrete, among many other uses. Thus, without alt text, readers who need to rely on screen readers, or who have to turn off their images for some reason, do not have access to the entire meaning of the text.

In other words, the decision-making power of what is (or is not) made available in alt text is held by sighted people with visual access to the images. This is a huge responsibility from an ethical perspective. When practicing the description exercise, I thought of how each word was a decision that implied what I was sharing of the world. 

Thus, writing alt text should not be taken as a mere requisite for complying with disability policies, such as Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 or following Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. From an ethical perspective, alt text is a commitment to the world we want to live in. This commitment challenges us to create quality alt text in everything we do, from academic projects to everyday interactions.

Many of us who don’t need alt text to access information are not familiar with it and its aesthetics, and even think of “alt text” as boring. Alt text as poetry centers on the power, beauty, and rich possibilities of alt text. Shannon compares it to translation: how can we make alt text beautiful and communicative? I think of transcreation, a concept from translation studies which focuses on the fact that translating has an implicit creative task in which the translator is not just copying the text into a new language, but creating a new text. This same principle applies when we write alt text for an image.

“Who is in charge of alt text?” – someone asked at the workshop. In this piece, I chose the term ethics to refer to the practice of alt text as an ethical decision that we can make as text producers. From this perspective, we take the responsibility upon ourselves to create the alt text – it cannot be “someone else’s job.” 

A digital fellow experience

When collaborating on the Command Line Workshop, a particular challenge arose with alt text for this image:

With the pedagogical goal in mind, I decided to write the following:

“This screenshot of the Command Line trying to read a .docx file shows a very long string of symbols, letters from different alphabets, and even characters that our fonts cannot recognize (which are question marks). Here we reproduce only a tiny part of the long result to give you a bit of the taste of the nonsense it is for humans: exclamation mark control character question mark l Z square bracket Content_Types square bracket .xml question mark question mark question mark question mark n question mark 0E” 

Alt text should be part of the entire writing process rather than an afterthought. It should be part of our draft. We start our process by making clear what the function of the image is for the text and creating alt text that makes a meaningful contribution to the reader. Then, other participants in the text production process can provide feedback at different stages. For example, in the Command Line Workshop, I received feedback from fellows and faculty from GC Digital Initiatives. Alt text deserves as much attention as any other part of the text: it is part of the meaning we create for our readers!