"Night Train" by Joshua Hardie [Zerahoc]
"Night Train" by Joshua Hardie [Zerahoc]
Image Transcription: Art
[The artwork shows a snowy nighttime setting. The sky is dark and clear, scattered with countless stars, and the full moon hangs bright and large in the top left. In the distance, a line of mountains is cast dark in silhouette. Close-up, a small hill and stretch of flat ground are swept with snow and sparse tufts of grass and other small plants. They lead up to a length of railway atop a ridge.
A steam train is front-and-centre here, emerging from the distance with its engine carriage facing towards the viewer. The windows burn with a fiery glow as a column of steam trails away behind it, highlighted with touches of deep red just above the chimney. A pale yellowy light illuminates ahead of the train. The other carriages are mostly hidden behind the engine.
Atop the hill, on the right side of the image, a figure in a long coat and a hat, probably a fedora, stands facing the train, their back to the viewer. Their hand is raised just in front of their mouth, and a spark of flame-coloured light suggests they may be lighting a cigarette, cigar or pipe.]
I am a human who transcribes posts to improve accessibility on Lemmy. Transcriptions help people who use screen readers or other assistive technology to use the site. For more information, see here.
ah. now. this is an interesting conversation
generally i try my best with accessibility; but recently i have been slacking with alt text in this lemmysphere[^1] specifically. my thinking is that this i visual-focussed art appreciation 'sphere, so the vast minority (i hesitate to speak in absolutes, but i could say none) of the subscribers will be blind or even partially sighted
i am fully in favour of transcriptions of text screenshots and images with semantic meaning, but this is solely an æsthetic piece?
do you, or does anyone affected by this, have any opinions on whether this is worth it here?
(very atmospheric transcription though)
edit: more questions:
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why do you have multiple 'spheres ([email protected], [email protected]) rather than one centralised one? - especially as lemmy doesn't support instance agnostic post links, and your links are therefore inconsistent and off-instance
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how did you find this post? do you just browse by new?
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to anyone who uses a screen reader - is there any advantage to a separate transcription if there is one in the alt text?
[^1]: and the other f.n.i.c. 'spheres
As I don't personally benefit from transcriptions (except in extremely rare cases where my colourblindness becomes pertinent), I'd say asking the folks over at c/[email protected] would probably give you the best answer, but I can give my take as someone who has been doing transcriptions for a few years.
I think that including a transcription when you have the time do so is always better. It's never possible to say who might be interested in experiencing the content (and it's not just blind/partially sighted people who are helped out by transcriptions; see section 1, here for a non-exhaustive list). I an say for certain that there are people who benefit from and want them; when I was part of the (sadly now shuttered) r/TranscribersOfReddit project, we did receive requests for transcriptions of purely aesthetic pieces.
I think that, though the minority that can't view the image will be even more pronounced here, transcriptions are essentially another way of including more people in experiencing the same "scene", if that makes sense, even if they're doing so via a different medium. As just one example, that could include people who previously enjoyed the community, but became blind/partially sighted and still want to experience the content in some way. Obviously it's a bit subjective, which is usually something we try to avoid in transcribing, but I try to write transcriptions of art or scenic photographs with the intent of capturing the atmosphere of the image rather than with purely clinical descriptions as I might in other situations, while still including all the actual details of the image.
That said, obviously detailed transcriptions take a fair bit of time, so it's definitely not a mark against anyone who doesn't include them. I find myself doing a lot less of them these days as well. I would say this is one of the circles where transcriptions are less pertinent, but I think it's always a good thing to have more ways of accessing content.
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