This post is made with speech to text because my hand hurts from typing so much today. Please forgive any typos or speech to text swapping similar sounding words.
If you would like to start writing your own image descriptions, feel free to ask any questions.
The main things to keep in mind is that they should begin with some variation of image description start or ID, and end with some variation of image description and, and ID or something like that. This distinguish the image description from the caption or anything else.
Image descriptions should not be written in italics, bold, all caps, or any colors. If text in the image is in all caps, write it in regular case, and simply note before or after it that it's in all caps.
Image descriptions should describe all images in the post, without skipping any. This includes images that are nothing but text.
Plain text image descriptions in the body of the post are more accessible than alt text alone, because many people who need image descriptions cannot use alt text, and Tumblr is known for its glitches, so the accessibility of the alt text all by itself varies widely over time.
It is more accessible to have the image descriptions indented than not, because this helps to visually separate the image description from the caption. Having brackets or parentheses at the end is also helpful for this. This allows people to easily distinguish between the caption and the image description if they need to.
If you are an artist, writing image descriptions for your art will give you full control over the image description, and will allow you to correctly identify details that others might miss. This gives you the opportunity to show which parts of your art hold meaning to you and are important to notice.
If you are describing real people who are unknown to you, unless it is specified within the post or you are already aware, please do not assign any gendered terms to them, or any " male presenting or female presenting" terms like that. This is completely unnecessary and leads to misgendering. It is best to simply describe visible facts about the people. Hair color, length, clothes and style, pose, expression, the light or darkness of their skin, things like that. Do not assume that someone is white simply because they have light skin.
Do not use image descriptions to lie to the audience in any way and do not use image descriptions to make jokes where the audience reading the image description is the butt of the joke.
As an example, if there is a very clearly fake screenshot, do not say that it is simply a screenshot, or if a photo is very blatantly photoshopped, do not say that it is simply a photo. Say an edited photo, a badly edited photo, a screenshot with editing, something like that to indicate the changes have been made and then what you are going to be describing is not the natural version.
As an example, you would say a crab photoshopped to be driving a car. Rather than a photo of a crab driving a car.
Unless you are transcribing a text within the image, do not use meme speak within image descriptions. Do not refer to dogs as doggos for example, unless it is to specify that the dog in the image is, within the image, labeled as a doggo. Do not describe someone walking downstairs as breasted bubbly downstairs, even if it is an actor humorously walking down the stairs to imitate that sentence. Describe the facts of the movements, and then you can make the comparison for clarity.
If someone adds an image description to your post whether this be an original post or a reblog that you have added an image to, it doesn't matter how many notes to post already has, please copy and paste that image description into the original post or your original reblog. If it is a new post that has only a few notes from friends, after you update the original, you can just ask your friends to delete the reblogs of the inaccessible version and reblog the new one. Most people who are good people and care about disabled people will happily do so.
Keep in mind that image descriptions are accessibility tools. Treat them as such.
Anyone can write image descriptions. You do not need any special qualifications or training. As long as you are willing to take constructive criticism if you make a mistake, an image description written by someone who's new to it and honestly doing their best with good intentions is better than no image description at all.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, so please feel free to add on more tips and advice.
This is a great resource! I've been writing image descriptions on my posts for a while, but I'm still not one hundred percent sure about the most accessible grammar and punctuation to use in image descriptions.
Like, similar with keysmashes, is it best not to transcribe a lot of exclamation points or question marks in a row? And just write "with a lot of question marks" in the description?
Also, I know screen readers recognize a lot of punctuation as pauses, but you still need to distinguish transcribed text with bumpers like "quote" and "endquote." So if I'm using quote/endquote bumpers, should I still put quotation marks? Should I put a comma between the word "quote" and the actual text, like you're taught to do in written works, or should I forgo it for ease of reading and listening?
For when there's a lot of exclamation or question marks, I'll usually just note that there's "many exclamation marks at the end" or something like that.
For those who didn't see it in the replies, for keysmashes, it's best to just note that there is a keysmash present rather than typing it out, because screen reader users would have to listen to it spell out every individual letter.
As a part I forgot with the original post, if there are emojis, please give a short description of them rather than inserting the actual emoji. A lot of emojis can only work on certain systems / computers, and sometimes it's hard to tell what they are. And if there are multiple emojis in a row, screenreaders will describe them one by one even if they're all the same. So if there's a dozen crying emojis, if you put all of them in the ID as emojis, the person would have to listen to the screenreader repeat the same thing a dozen times. (this is also why posts with tons of repetitive emojis are inaccessible, it just turns into a massive block of descriptions)
For the question about quotes, I'm not sure about that, so hopefully someone else can answer.
Also...since I forgot to include this in the original post, for those unaware, image descriptions are accessibility tools for blind, visually impaired, cognitively impaired, and other disabled people who can't see, or have trouble comprehending images. Blind people use the internet just like anyone else!
