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Image Transcription: Meme
['More will come' - a three panel sequence from Lord of the rings, featuring king Theoden speaking to Aragorn as they stand together in a soldier encampment. In the first two panels, Theoden appears slightly anxious and dismayed, then in the third panel, Theoden turns to Aragorn to speak reassuringly]
Six
Less than half of what I'd hoped for
More will come.
^I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
I personally don't need the transcript, but I admire your mission.
If even one person benefits from it, then I've done my job
Not visually impaired, but I thank you nevertheless.
But, yeah, this actually made me curious: image-based memes, how do visually-impaired people enjoy them? How different would it be to compared to how sighted people enjoy them?
Screen readers. There are programs for the visually impaired that can read out specific parts of transcriptions for images, but it requires an adequate transcription to be in place.
My transcriptions follow the typical ToR format - first it identifies the type of image, then it provides a description of the image itself, giving the necessary contextual details to have a decent grasp on what they are looking at. Finally, it lists the text placed over the image. The different sections are separated from one another using paragraphs and line breaks, and labelled, so the screen reader can easily jump from one to the next with ease. This allows the person to have a decent idea of what the image was trying to convey, so they can then participate in the post and experience what the other sighted users are experiencing.
Transcriptions are also there for people who have internet connection issues and can't load the image, or who have a difficult time understanding what they're looking at and could benefit from a description of the visuals themselves. But the format is very intentional in order to be screen reader compatible, to allow blind and visually impaired users to participate in enjoying the post.
Hope this helps!
It's wonderful to see this here. Thank you for your service o7
I'm also interested in doing this work. I considered joining transcribers of reddit years ago but didn't want to fuck up. Where did you learn how to do this?
ToR, on reddit. We're currently doing a clear the queue event, the last of it's kind since we have to shut down from the API changes. Feel free to hop on the discord and someone can help guide you on what to do (I'm in the VC right now actually)
And everyone fucks up sometimes. You just gotta follow the template, and correct it when you're given corrections by the mod teams. I've done over 50 transcriptions (putting me in the top 10% of ToR volunteers) and I still fuck up lots, don't worry.
Thanks for this breakdown. I've been previously exposed to this kind of thing back in Reddit, but your explanation added some more perspective about it.
However, my question is really more about how the blind (and visually impaired people--both of which I lumped under the term "visually impaired") experience and enjoy image-based memes. I can't really imagine such memes without the associated image, as they're doing a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of conveying the context (of the meme) and all its associations.
Still, thanks for the explanation. I am supposing that what the image does for me the description does for the blind (and visually impaired).
I do my best to encapsulate the necessary experience of the image in my transcriptions (for example, I'll employ comedic timing in memes and funnier images if I can, or describe what is seen in the order my brain processed it in), but there's only so much a transcriber can do.
I'm not entirely sure how blind/VI users experience these sorts of transcriptions, since I'm fortunate enough to be a fully seeing individual, but if anyone who is part of that community would like to chime in with their experiences it would be really valuable to learn!
You're doing good work!
I've you haven't done so already I'd suggest that you add a feature requests on github. for the devs to add the possibilities to add alt descriptions for image posts to Lemmy.
I have absolutely no idea how to work GitHub or most technology overall haha. I'm a volunteer transcriber currently transcribing freelance on Lemmy