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1 day agoAre there any blind people on Lemmy, screenreading this? I get why alt-text is useful functionally on things like application interfaces, and instructive or educational text, but do you actually enjoy hearing a screen reader say "A meme of four oanels. First panel. An image of a young man in a field. He is Anakin Skywalker as played by that guy who played Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. He says ‘bla bla bla’. Next frame. An image of a young woman. She is Padme as played by Natalie Portman. She is smiling. She says “bla bla bla, right?”
There’s also the element of wasting the blind person’s time. I work in enterprise software and our application meets WCAG guidelines but… it’s a busy, text-heavy, actions-heavy application. It can take 5 minutes for a screen reader to read the entire page. Other websites are worse - images as buttons, flavour images and hero banners and icons everywhere. Again, a much more accessible version is just presenting them with what they actually want - a cleaner, leaner, more contextual page like the ones we built in the 90s before images loaded instantly.
So part of me wonders if blind people actually enjoy “listening to memes” or if they’d rather skip it and hear a text-based joke or an audio/video joke. I did specifically say I wanted a blind person’s opinion on it.
I think you’ve underestimated the wordcount and I think you don’t get how memes are shared if you think adding 4 minutes to their re-transmission wouldn’t matter. I cars that blind people enjoy the internet but I absolutely do not think “searchability” is a good reason to transcribe “Drake meme but it’s an animal girl. Top panel. Animal girl looking repulsed. The item she is repulsed by is the logo of a Linux package manager called Flatpak…”