Why not just use a picture?

[skibbley]

I have seen a number of times where people so the equivalent of passing on a flyer or poster online: sending an image containing text and pictures.

I'd like people to do better and think it might be worth me writing something to point people to.

I tend to aim for the positive benefits of solutions rather than highlighting the problems.

This would be aimed mainly at the original author as subsequent forwarders won't have the original source and so would need to transcribe the image.

I'd acknowledge that it might take a bit more work to do what I ask and a bit more technical knowledge.

I'd acknowledge than an image works perfectly well for many people and has the advantages of being just what was designed.

I'd acknowledge that for some things, the image is the thing and just isn't as useful when described, but you'd still want a note telling you that.

I'd note that image recognition is improving and might go part way or all the way to solving this automatically but I don't think it is widely available and accurate enough yet.

There are times you only get an image, such as printout or on a screen. There may still be chances to offer the publication in other formats or allow an easier link to an online version using a shortened URL for easier typing, a QR code or similar. I wonder how much it would cost to embed Near Field Communication (NFC) in a poster, though readers would still need to know to access it.

Main reasons for making information available as text or in a structured computer readable format (HTML, CSV, ALT text description etc.):

• Accessibility for people with sight disabilities.
  • More people can be interested in your thing than those who can see it. Lots of people in the world can't see so well but can access information in other ways or with assistive tools. While you could make more accessible versions available on demand, doing so proactively lowers a small barrier to access and may reduce your future workload as well as showing you care about inclusion. There may be legal requirements for accessibility.
• Accessibility for people using devices were images are harder to use or impossible
  • If someone is using a small device or relying on audio while walking say, your thing will be more useful to them if it could be read out say. Some tech is still text based, standard text messaging on phones say or the time to transfer images slows things down too much in places with limited bandwidth such as on a train or in areas of dodgy mobile signal.
• Discoverability
  • Text can be indexed by big search engines on the internet and many people find things by searching even if they have seen them before. Images are much harder to search. Social media can find keywords to highlight to users also.
  • Text can be indexed by local personal search engines. If I can search my phone, email or forum for text then I can find something that I would have more difficulty accessing as just an image.
• Resuability
  • If I want to add an event to my personal or shared calendar I can cut and paste text or it might even be able to do that for me. Why should I need to type in the details again, taking my time and effort and perhaps leading to errors? Small barriers could lead to lower audiences.
  • For research findings, numbers are much more useful for reuse than a graph.
  • If you want me to promote your event, why not make it as easy as possible for me to share the details (which I might want to edit for space, add comments too or rearrange)?
  • Not just people can read text. Perhaps what you say could in the future become part of global knowledge mediated by computers. There are already projects doing automated inference generation from academic papers.

Comments

[barakta]

I have a pastebin account and where I have spoons I will OCR or transcribe images of text and upload to that and share the url... This is where stuff is useful and worth sharing, often from other disabled folk who are low on spoons so asking them to "be better" would be unkind... I have had a few people take the hint from that and start doing better, so it is a form of activism.

I also sometimes transcribe videos and visually describe images in a text form - again part of my wider activism.

I wish social media allowed you to add alt text to other people's images or a transcription. Cos I could see crowdsourcing doing that well. When I want to RT an tweet with an image which is undescribed I often download it and reupload it in my RT and add an alt text...

Social media platforms hide accessibility and don't make the description more easy to do and SEE for everyone (twitter could display the alt on mousehover!).

[skibbley]

Useful stuff thanks. I was initially thinking of trying to get upstream to authors and supporting better after-creation access improvement (and resourcing it!) seems important. There are projects to increase access to archives for example.

[siderea]

Hmm, yeah. I have no idea what to tell people. I've tried having this conversation with my alumni office, and it hasn't worked. (This is not theoretical: I had a blind classmate!) And there's now someone on an email discussion group for local therapists who keeps posting, ~"Hey, I'm running some groups, see the attached flier to know what they are. Please refer your patients." And I'm like, o_O.

Please also add: On my phone, I pay by the byte for all data transfer. When someone sends me a 2M pdf to say, "Anger management group, adults, all genders, starting Jan 3, 10am-12pm, 12 weeks, 3 Main Street, Town, State, Zip, applicants call Nancy 617-555-1212 or email NancyAngerGroup@gmail.com", and if I'm foolish enough to download it, I'm getting ripped off. I at least have the option of waiting till I'm on my desktop and manually downloading it for free, but not everyone has that option. When I was in community mental health, plenty of my patients - such as the ones who might have benefited by an anger management group and who could make a middle-of-the-workday appointment – generally had no internet access but their phones.

Which, maybe is the angle: "Fliers are terrible on phones. Too small, can't read 'em, people ignore them. Much more effective to use text."

[skibbley]

Thanks and yes. Still thinking about this stuff and appreciating you doing so too. I sometimes when I want a thing want to look at barriers and why it isn't already happening.

[ludy]

Not just users of screen-readers -there are a lot of people with more mild visual impairments (including colour-blindness), dyslexia, TBI, visual stress,
migraine and other neurological issues who can read text if we can make sure it's the right font/size/colour/level-of-contrast but not otherwise. We'll appreciate your pretty image much more if we aren't struggling to make sense of the words in contains!

Plus with improvements in computer translation using text may mean your information is also accessible to non-english speakers/English-learners who want/need to check that they've understood what you've written

[skibbley]

Useful thoughts thanks. Yes, lots of disability / diversity not directly the eyes can be involved and I hadn't thought of translation.