4 ms·

Those alt texts are oddly specific.

• vopi 6y ago
  > alt="A woman with medium-light skin and long dark hair." Interesting. Government accessibility requirements maybe?
  • jmisavage 6y ago
    Yep. All government sites have to be accessible due to section 508. These descriptions look like they were generated by some ML vision algorithm.
• Jaygles 6y ago
  I've always wondered about this. What exactly should you describe in an alt text? Are there established guidelines one could reference to determine what is appropriate?
  • WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    Accessibility guidelines in the alt spec used to say "correctly describe the intended purpose of the image if the image was missing or unable to be loaded". It would have probably been a bit more on the nose to be like "A woman of a non-white race showing our agency is capable of diversity"
  • itsnot2020 6y ago
    Have a read through the section 508 guidelines [0] from the US government, they link off to a couple of good sites detailing what the text should be. [0] - https://www.section508.gov/content/guide-accessible-web-design-development#images https://www.section508.gov/content/guide-accessible-web-desi...
• itsnot2020 6y ago
  Similar to what Facebook does automatically [0] which was easily visible with an outage they had in 2019 [1]. [0] - https://research.fb.com/videos/automatic-alt-text-for-photos-on-facebook/ https://research.fb.com/videos/automatic-alt-text-for-photos... [1] - https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681231/facebook-outage-image-tags-captions-ai-machine-learning-revealed https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681231/facebook-outage-i...
• hshshs2 6y ago
  too specific really... maybe it’s government accessibility red tape, but iirc some of these images are strictly decoration and would be better to be entirely ignored by screen readers and the like