ALT Text and Social Media: helping people is nice
You know, when I started sharing my art at Twitter I saw something called "ALT+" at the bottom of the images I uploaded, which at first I didn't know what it was or why it was even called "ALT" to begin with, but I didn't pay much attention to it. Some months after, when I joined Reddit (ew) I noticed that they added an "ALT Function" when you share more than one image, which made me curious. Skip forward to some time later, and I decided to get over this curiosity and search what it was all about. Once I learned about it, I've slowly started adding it to more and more pieces.
ALT Text, for those who may not know, is also known as "Alternative Text", and it's a way of adding text descriptions onto images, so they may be read by Screen Readers for people with vision impairments, or even help people of all kinds to understand images if it's something hard to understand at first glance, among other uses.
ALT Text is something curious, in the sense that many people have no idea what it even is, and yet, its something so valuable for making the internet a more accesible place.
It may be a bit hard at first, trying to find the best way to describe what you're uploading, but even a simple description of the image helps a lot more than not having any ALT Text at all. If you wanna go the extra mile and describe images in the best way possible, you'll get there if you keep trying on this. It's pretty much worth it to help others.
Now, depending on the platform you are on, it may be a bit harder to do ALT Text, such as the aforementioned Reddit, which has less than 200 characters per image that's only enabled when you upload two images or more, which makes this function redundant there, some may not even have that function at all, but others places (such as Mastodon and Bluesky) have a stronger user support for ALT Text, even having user-made tags for when you need help in adding them (or like in the case of Tumblr, other people reblogging with their own Image Descriptions (IDs)).
Now, it's important to note that you shouldn't write whatever unrelated thing you want in there, as that doesn't really help, if at all. If I sent an image of an apple, I wouldn't wanna type in ALT Text that "It's an orange", because while it may be funny for a few people, it's best to actually help on this. If you really want to add a pun or what not, I recommend doing so at the very end of the image description, that way the image is actually described first, and the extra is at the end to nicely close it off.
Subtitles also fit into this topic, but in a different way. Instead of describing the image, you describe what's happening in short descriptions, along with obviously having the audio written too. These are especially useful in places like YouTube because you can translate it into other languages, which is what I've been doing ever since I've relaunched my channel with actual voiceovers and editing.
Either way, you're helping others by adding ALT Text on your images, may it be social media or not, so please consider adding it, you may help a lot of people in doing so!
-AnubiArts, the ALT fella