In the poll below, there are six increasingly detailed descriptions of the same cover art. If you use a screen reader, I invite you to vote on the two questions: which options you think have an acceptable amount of detail, and which ones you think have the best amount of detail.
Either the page or the alt text would already mention the game’s title, saying “Cover art for [Game Title],” so this image description would be in addition to that.
If you don’t want to take the poll, but you’d rather suggest your own guidelines or write your own examples, that’s fine, too.
Descriptions:
Illustration of a sun.
Illustration of a sun with wide rays.
Illustration of a red-orange sun with wide rays in a blue sky.
In a square illustration divided horizontally in thirds, the middle section shows a red-orange sun with prominent rays. The sun has a mottled surface and is surrounded by a glow of light. Rays from the sun widen as they extend outward to the edges of the section. The top section of the illustration is purplish blue, the bottom section is blue, and in the middle section, the background transitions from one shade to the other.
Imagine a description that includes all of the above, and also says that the title is in white and is visible through the rays.
Imagine a description that includes all of the above, and also says that the sun is above and to the left of center, that the rays get fainter as they get farther from the sun, and that a narrow, bright blue border outlines the middle section of the picture.
In your opinion, which options have an acceptable amount of detail, even if it’s not ideal?
None of them
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
Option 4
Option 5
Option 6
0voters
Which option(s) come closest to the amount of detail you prefer?
Not a screen reader user myself, but every guide to writing alt text that I’ve ever seen suggests to me that 4 & above is an excessive amount of detail, and also that if there’s title text in the image then you should prioritize mentioning that over describing subtle details of texture and background gradient. The point is to convey the content of the image, not the fine details of its visual appearance.
The title would automatically be included either as part of the alt text or nearby on the page. So this image description would be in addition to that. I’ve now edited the original post to say that.
I said the same thing in the other thread based on my experience with official guidelines we use for editing alt text at my job, but a screenreader user responded to say actually they would love long, detailed descriptions, hence, I assume, the poll.
Speaking as a screen reader user, I’m torn and not sure how to respond to the poll.
I’m not sure any of the samples really feel like a natural description of cover art… the first three feels more like describing a desktop icon and the latter feel less like painting a picture in words and more like an attempt to provide instructions on how to create the image… At least, that’s kind of my gut reaction… I may need to give this more thought on a full stomach or when it’s earlier in the day(its nearly 9PM and I haven’t started on cooking supper, which I like to do around 8PM, so its kind of late and I’m running behind my preferred meal schedule.
I had been wondering, "Since people who use screen readers have different preferences about level of detail, what should people writing cover descriptions on IFDB aim for? What is the range of what is acceptable, and are there boundaries where people generally agree “that’s too vague” or “that’s too detailed”?
I’ve come across detailed image descriptions at, for example, the National Gallery of Art website, but I don’t know if people are going to want that kind of description on IFDB.
Maybe there are some kinds of details that are helpful and others that are not.
More generally, I’m wondering, what advice should IFDB give to people writing cover art descriptions? People who may have never written one before, who may be describing art (often amateur art) that is not their own?
There are some pretty standard recommendations like “Don’t say ‘image’ because the screen reader already says that,” “Don’t repeat nearby text,” and “End with a period,” but other than that.
One idea I came across for detailed descriptions was to start with an overview in the first sentence, and then people who don’t want to hear all the details can just stop listening at that point.
So whether you take the poll or not, any ideas along those lines would be helpful. (Though I don’t mean to imply that you personally need to answer these questions.)
It seems to me that the specific type of detailed description you’re pointing to on the art gallery website, i.e. “instructions on how to create the image” as Mewtamer puts it, make more sense for an art gallery website (where the point is to discuss visual art itself, including details like colour and composition) than for cover art (where the point is to grab attention and communicate something about the nature of the game).
This deserves underlining. If you’re summarizing the cover art in text, the text should accomplish the same things as the cover art, ideally. All of those descriptions above fail at both tasks spectacularly, in my humble opinion.
Yeah, the style of description is probably as important as level of detail and what style of description is most appropriate certainly depends on what purpose the image is being used for. A detailed, compositional description is very much on point for a website about art composition and critique or about making art, but for a image promoting a movie, game, or book, you probably want a more prose or trailer-like style.
Trying to think of a game cover I can remember vividly from before I went blind, I might describe the US cover art for Pokemon Yellow as follows:
Pikachu, a chubby, yellow furred rodent stares you down, its lightning bolt tail raised behind it as it rears up on its hind legs, stubby for paws raised in fists, lightning crackling around the red spots on its cheeks, it’s pointed ears pricked up.
Or at least, I think that’s the kind of pose Pikachu had on the box art for the US release of Yellow, and admittedly, Pokemon’s standard practice of having the game’s mascot more or less take up the entire cover aside from the system identification and game logo makes describing them more straight forward than some… And of course, you could be more or less detailed in describing Pikachu, but for the above, I was kind of splitting the difference between targetting those who know exactly what a Pikachu looks like and those who have never heard of a pikachu.
Also, if the cover is meant to be a visual representation of an in-game location, it might be worth adapting the in-game description of that location for the image description.
Trying to think of other cover art to give a stab at describing, but my visual memory is failing me and I can’t be sure the images my mind is conjuring are legit and not false reconstructions.
I also got some feedback from asparagus from ifMUD, who said it was okay to post it here but that it’s “personal taste/thoughts and it’s somewhat off-the-cuff”:
My personal taste is to just keep the descriptions primarily utilitarian and as succinct as possible. Include anything that would be seen as must-know info, exclude extraneous fluff.
asparagus said that, for cover images that are “simple/boring,”
Trying to describe them in exciting terms seems like an impossibility without copious amounts of poetic license.
Also,
if trailer style text is called for, I think that’s probably best saved for the actual game description. It’s not like the image is the only source of info about the game.
So, focusing specifically on the opinions of people in the IF community who use screen readers, it seems like preferences vary.
asparagus also said this, which I think sums it up:
It’s just really unfortunate that there’s no perfect answer for this and you won’t be able to please everyone.
As a sighted person it seems to me that the distinction would be to give the verb and not the noun for the alt text. In the developer.mozilla.org page the top 2 concerns that alt-text solves are 1) for the visually impaired and 2) Choice to not show image to save bandwidth. So lots of big descriptive text seems to defeat both those design elements.
I don’t know what these guidelines are based on, but I remembered the one place where I’ve seen actual existing guidelines for IF cover art alt text: in the Inform 7 manual.
The cover art section says the text “should be brief,” and shows two examples:
I’m not blind, so obviously take that with an enormous grain of salt. If I’m ever struck blind and by some miracle I actually remember this post at that point, I’ll circle back around and see if this changes my POV.
That said, I think the fact that you’re even asking the question at all is pretty awesome and considerate.
Now I want to try… what about a couple options for the cover of He Sold the Sun? From probably too short to about the longest that seems reasonable to me?
Title on stock art.
The title hovers over red-orange plasma, a dollar-sign filling the O.
The title hovers over red-orange plasma, the O of “sold!” covered by a token stamped with a dollar sign: spare white high-waisted Art Deco capitals floating above the sun on black shadows (your basic bloom effect).
(I hope Art Deco is the right period for those letters)
IDK. I think as a reader, I mostly want to know if the cover image suggests anything interesting about the story, and maybe some guess of how much work the author put into it: is it Al slop; is it the common text-and-clip-art; did they apply some effects to a photo they might have taken themselves; did they draw something? Were they any good at drawing something, or do they get an A for effort? I don’t know that I believe that many people care what’s where in the image…
At work (government agency in the U.S.) we’re working to make our website WCAG compliant which will be required by the end of the year. I’m only working adjacent to the accessibility team, but recommend seeking those guidelines if we’re looking for something to base decisions upon.