Poll: Alt text for cover art on IFDB

General IF Community Resources
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Voting for these poll questions is meant for screen reader users and others who read alt text, and other people who are knowledgeable about this topic, but anyone can feel free to post a reply to the thread.

1. Do you think IFDB should have alt text for game cover art?
  • Yes.
  • It’s not a big deal either way.
  • No.
0 voters
2. Right now, game pages on IFDB (for example, the Lost Pig page) usually show a small version of the cover that functions as a link. If there were alt text for this small cover, what should it say? You can choose more than one option.
  • The alt text should be blank, since it’s just a decorative image.
  • The alt text should identify the image, for example, “Cover of Lost Pig.”
  • The alt text should say what the link leads to.
  • The alt text should describe what the art looks like.
  • Something else.
0 voters
3. Clicking the small cover on the game page takes you to a large version of the cover with its copyright information (for example, this large cover for Lost Pig). What should the alt text say for this large cover? You can choose more than one option.
  • The alt text should be blank, since it’s just a decorative image.
  • The alt text should identify the image, for example, “Cover of Lost Pig.”
  • The alt text should describe what the art looks like.
  • Something else.
0 voters
4. The search results page and the browse page can list up to 100 games at a time. Next to each result is a postage-stamp sized cover that links to the page for that game. What should the alt text say? You can choose more than one option.
  • The alt text should be blank, since it’s just a decorative image.
  • The alt text should identify the image, for example, “Cover of 80 Days.”
  • The alt text should say what the link leads to.
  • The alt text should describe what the art looks like.
  • Something else.
0 voters
5. On IFDB’s poll pages, each game listed has a postage-stamp sized version of the cover that links to the page for that game. What should the alt text say? You can choose more than one option.
  • The alt text should be blank, since it’s just a decorative image.
  • The alt text should identify the image, for example, “Cover of 80 Days.”
  • The alt text should say what the link leads to.
  • The alt text should describe what the art looks like.
  • Something else.
0 voters
6. In recommendation lists created by users, each game listed has a small version of the cover that links to the page for that game. What should the alt text say? You can choose more than one option.
  • The alt text should be blank, since it’s just a decorative image.
  • The alt text should identify the image, for example, “Cover of 80 Days.”
  • The alt text should say what the link leads to.
  • The alt text should describe what the art looks like.
  • Something else.
0 voters

Note: I edited this post to add questions 4, 5, and 6, and accidentally deleted question 3 in the process. I put question 3 back in, but I don’t know of a way to get the original votes back for that question. Sorry! My recollection is that 100% of voters had voted to describe what the art looked like, and there was also at least one vote for identifying the image. But feel free to vote again if you’d like.

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The webaim accessibility guide on alt text is very good.

To my understanding of best practices:

  • Cover art for a game is not decorative as it is contextually relevant to the content of the webpage and topic. The alt text should not be empty here.
    • Decorative images are like, “random stock photo of person smiling on a business website” or “little svg of an exclamation point in an alert popup”.
  • Alt text should not be a description of the link of the image.
    1. Alt text should describe the content of the image.
    2. Screenreaders already read out link text.
    I just reread the link I sent, looks like this point was incorrect, but it goes to opinion 1

Opinions:

  1. The tiny cover art that is a link to the big cover art (which is not much bigger than the tiny cover art given ifdb’s upload limits) should have the same alt text as the big art. Most people are looking at the game landing page and having to click another link to get the cover art described seems like bad ux.
  2. I don’t think “cover art of [game name]” is great, though it’s better than nothing. If it’s just the game title, maybe, but for something like Lost Pig with an actual bit of art on it I’d describe the art. For ex: “A cartoon of a pig running. Text reads, ‘Lost Pig and place underground, by Grunk as told to Admiral Jota’”. (Note: I don’t normally put the title of the game in my cover art alt text, but here there’s a subtitle not in the game page)

ETA: these all were comments about the main game pages, not recommended lists or search etc like polls 4, 5, & 6.

4 Likes
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Here’s several game titles that I have alt text for on my website. Most of them don’t mention the game title because the rest of the page has the game title and author(s), for ex: You Promise. (Click the image to see the alt text I wrote)

You Promise

A fortune cookie fortune with the words 'You Promise' on it, and a series of numbers.
A fortune cookie fortune with the words 'You Promise' on it, and a series of numbers.630×500 77.8 KB

Erstwhile:

A thanksgiving turkey, rendered in stark white and red.
A thanksgiving turkey, rendered in stark white and red.1500×1500 367 KB

In a minute there is time:

A closeup of a clock.
A closeup of a clock.630×500 92.6 KB

My Cat’s Song

A cat sitting at a window behind some blinds.
A cat sitting at a window behind some blinds.1676×1051 4.98 KB

1 Like
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I wonder how screenreader-accessible IFDB is in the first place. When I last looked at the code, I noticed that a lot of forms in the site don’t have correct field labels and violate some rules of accessible design. I did try updating one form/page, I think it was the “Edit Profile Page” one, but gave up partway through because it was a lot of work, it was only one form among many, and because my other updates to the site hadn’t been accepted yet and I want to wait for those to get in first.

My instinct is that the alt text for the small image should say that it’s a cover for Game X and tell the user that it links to a larger version of the image, and the large image should have an image description. I’ll defer to actual screenreader users, though.

1 Like
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Thanks for the responses so far!

I edited the original post to add questions 4, 5, and 6, and accidentally deleted question 3 in the process. Question 3 is back now, but I don’t know of a way to get the original votes back for that question. Sorry! My recollection is that 100% of those voters had voted to describe what the art looked like, and there was also at least one vote for identifying the image. But feel free to vote again if you’d like.

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So far, it seems like in some cases (like on the search results page), voters want the alt text to say where the link leads, and also identify the image as cover art. Does anyone have suggestions on how to word the alt text for that? I’m not sure I’ve come across any examples that are trying to do both of those kinds of things at once.

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Here are some suggestions from asparagus on ifmud:

For the small postage stamp thumbnails, if they link to the main game page I thin kthe alt text should just be the name of the game. If they link to something else, like the links in the “External Links” section at the top, then I think the alt text should probably be the same as the plain text link, e.g. “Story File (z8)”

[…] when you’re navigating through a large list, even the phrasing order matters. i.e. rapidly moving through 50 graphical links is faster if it says “Game Name Cover” vs. “Cover of Game Name”, for two reasons. One less word, but also “Game Name Cover” gives you the changing info first so if you’re specifically looking for something you can move on immediately after hearing the first syllable.

This was another suggestion about the cover art images in search results. Right now, each cover image is its own link, and then the text of the game name is another, second link to the same place:

So from what I can tell, the usual pattern is: For two links, make the graphic link set to aria-hidden=“true”, or move the image and text into a single link and make the image alt text=“”

Otherwise what happens is when you’re browsing you hear “Cover of foo, graphic link” and then “foo” when you move to the next item which is the plain text link. Ideally you only want to hear one of those, the other is extraneous.

For the image that links to the larger image, I think it should probably say something like "<image description>. Click for full sized image + copyright info"

And on the page with the copyright info the image should probably just have alt text of the description with nothing extra. It’s presumably a non-link image on that page.

3 Likes
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To echo what Aster included, ADA Compliance provides guidance on many of these points.

2 Likes
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Why not have big enough images have alt-text describing the image, and small images say it’s a link. It’s closer to how people normally see things as well ?

On the other hand, having alt text saying that it’s “the cover image for {game name}" or saying it’s linking to a game seems redundant to me, as in all cases the name of the game is right beside on IFDB, so why not have all alt-text describe the image?

Btw I don’t use screen readers, but this is what made sense to me.

1 Like
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Yeah, I like most of those. On the listings the image is redundant and probably annoying: it doesn’t take twice as long for us sighted people to scroll through the search results because there’s both an image and text.

I’d disagree with adding “Click for full sized image + copyright info” – if you wouldn’t advocate for adding visible text telling sighted people that, why is it OK to waste anyone’s time with it?

Similarly, I’d leave out the word “Cover” - there’s nothing telling sighted people that “The function of this image is to be the cover of Junior Arithmancer” so why would anyone else need that explained to them? And I would tend to make the alt text blank for as-yet-undescribed cover images. Yes, technically they aren’t just decorative images, but saying “Cover of Dr. Horror’s House of Terror” feels a bit like saying “Hey look, there’s an image here but we’re not going to tell you anything useful about it.”

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Here are some more explanations from asparagus.

Re: what happens when an image is by itself inside a link with an empty alt attribute, a page on Webaim.org says “When an image is the only content inside a link or button, alt text is all that a screen reader has to go on. If it’s empty or missing, screen readers might read the image filename or the URL of the linked page in hopes that this may be helpful to the user, but this is not always the case.”

asparagus says:

Yeah, that’s true in my experience. I think that’s what happens for the main cover image on the ifdb page. For Lost Pig, for example, immediately before the level 1 heading I get this: viewgame coverart&id=mohwfk47y…"
Which is presumably the link to the page with more image info.

I checked, and it does look like that cover image asparagus is talking about has an empty alt attribute.

About saying “Cover art for Lost Pig” versus just saying “Cover art” if we’re already on the page for Lost Pig, asparagus says,

I’d probably opt for “Cover art for Lost Pig”, just because “cover art” sounds very generic and there’s sometimes other fairly meaningless alt text on some pages, so even if ifdb is perfect, crappy pages have conditioned me to zone out for some things.

About the advantage of saying what happens when you click the cover art on the game page, asparagus says that there is probably little advantage to including that, but

I still fall on the side of not making it really easy to miss a link to somewhere because it isn’t obvious where the link goes/what it’s for.

And this is also where discretion comes in. For a single image immediately before the main heading, I think you can be slightly more verbose. For a lot of images in a list, you want to be as terse and succinct as possible.

And also

I think there’s another field for images, maybe title= that sets the mouseover text, so that could always be added if you want to give sighted users slightly more info.

2 Likes
12

For the pages that have list of links, it does seem like combining adjacent cover art and title links into one link would

  • follow recommended practice
  • announce where the cover art link goes, which seems like something voters wanted (in this case, the title of the game is where the link goes)
  • avoid redundancy in announcing two links that go to the same place
  • avoid potential problems with screen readers trying to supply their own information about where the image link goes if we keep the image by itself with an empty alt attribute

For the cover art on the game page and the larger cover art with the copyright info, it sounds like even fairly simple alt text would be an improvement over something like “viewgame coverart&id=mohwfk47yâ”. Ideally we could also include custom image descriptions on one or both of those pages, though that might be a bigger project, and I’m not actually sure if it’s possible in the current dev environment (the readme says it doesn’t include the images database). But it seems like a good goal.

3 Likes
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I just want to share an excerpt from an essay about some of the common pitfalls of alt text written by sighted people who don’t really understand what blind and vision-impaired users want to get out of alt text:

https://bugdotpng.tumblr.com/post/816352014768472064/against-access-can-be-read-here

(I’m linking this Tumblr post rather than the essay directly because most of it is not about alt text and is more of a discussion of the nature and purpose of accessibility as a concept.)

I think adding alt text is a good initiative but I worry about the potential for enthusiastic but underinformed people to make the database harder to navigate for users of screenreaders or refreshabraille devices by creating what the essayist refers to as “dense word pictures.” So I’d want to see some kind of alt text guideline page on IFDB, preferably linked inline with the alt text field on the game edit page the way that the explanations of things like the Zarfian forgiveness scale and the different license types are now. Maybe also a fairly low character limit for the alt text field.

(Also, asparagus is right about the mouseover text property being title=.)

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Re: question 2, the small cover art is there to be a link to the large cover art while also sparking recognition in sighted users. Nobody peers at it for detail, they’d click through to the big art for that, and it’s sometimes a deliberately less detailed version of the image anyway. There is no point in describing it.

I don’t think the quick visual recognition function really has an analogue, but since it’s all visual, one isn’t needed.

Making the small cover alt text a succinct link to the actual cover art for screenreader users, as has been discussed, seems the best option to me.

-Wade

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I like the idea of an alt text guideline page, I’d be happy to help with writing something like that. Having ready info on how to write an image description may encourage more to try writing one.

I’m less keen on a specifically low character limit. I see this essay passed around and referenced plenty on social media, almost always by sighted people meaning just as well as those described in the essay, but unfortunately somewhat drowning out those of us who are more than fine with a detailed alt text. In my view, if the picture is a whole picture, why would I want a fractional description? I’ll always be wondering if the text set aside specifically for describing the image is leaving out details I might really appreciate, to avoid inconveniencing me with… information about the image? Of course, this is partly subjective, I’m always aware others prefer different styles. I just think it’d be at the least something of a shame to enforce brevity on the IFDB of all places. If a picture speaks a thousand words, why not let it have its thousand? :slight_smile:

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That’s fair! I shared the essay because the point it makes about alt text comports with what I know of best practices from work (while being perhaps a little less dry than your average set of accessibility guidelines), but I do typically deal with alt text in contexts that are more functional than artistic.

IFDB being a database, this context seems a little bit in-between the two—the purpose of the cover art for a sighted user is to help get people interested in the game, and a more creative description of the cover art might serve the same purpose, but at the same time people do visit IFDB looking for specific information or links, and while I understand that preferences vary I guess my feeling was that having very long descriptions would be more annoying to the people who prefer concision than having short descriptions would be to the people who enjoy more detail.

But it’s probably fine to encourage that but not force it, kind of like with summaries—you can put quite a lot of text in that field, but most people don’t.

Edit: And I guess as long as we’re only including the full image description on the game pages themselves and not wherever the thumbnails appear, it’s not so much a problem, as people who don’t care about detailed image descriptions can just skip through them.

1 Like