#I also don't actually know if video descriptions were intended more for low vision and blindness or for d/Deaf/HoH ppl or both

[citrusella-flugpucker]

https://www.tumblr.com/can-i-make-image-descriptions/704588725997404160/general-guide-for-image-descriptions?source=share

Hi! Thanks for sending this, and I imagine I can figure out how you decided to send it to my blog! (Specifically (this parenthetical is for my followers' benefit, not yours, since I know where you found me), I replied to someone on a post calling out some users' behavior in requesting image descriptions (can link the post if needed but am avoiding at present for de-escalatory reasons), explaining why I thought someone who writes image descriptions themselves would still advocate for others to write them (and why not everyone who doesn't ALWAYS provide them is necessarily ableist--they can be, of course, but there are myriad reasons someone might not). Other people in the post's replies reported also getting sent this link, so this anon is probably monitoring the replies of that post and contacting everyone who gives it a note of any type.)

I know all of the guidance the post you've linked here shares, so I thought I'd elaborate more on my personal philosophy regarding image descriptions.

...I love creating accessibility where I can manage to do so! I was a longtime contributor to community captions on YouTube before the feature was shuttered, and I do my best caption or transcript my own content or to provide alt text where my posts contain images (I know there have been a handful of times I've forgotten to do so, though, especially on the alt side of things). Heck, I'm thinking of creating a zine (as in a physical one, to distribute locally) and trying to figure out how to offer it in braille and described!

I actually recently attended a panel hosted by the Longmore Institute on Disability at SFSU where blind/low-vision/partially-sighted people (and the attendees) were given three different audio descriptions of a comic produced with different description philosophies (one described like a movie's video description track, one the artist's extremely detailed sort of description intended for editors, and one a hypothetical narrative-like (i.e. written like book prose) description). The panel was a discussion and Q&A regarding what they liked best, some thoughts on best practices, and some ideas specific to art and comics. One thing I found striking was one of the panelists thought it'd be an interesting idea if it were possible to have multiple granularities of description available to choose between, kind of like how sighted users can zoom in on something or look closer at the detail. (This is only tangentially related to your ask, but I just think it was a really cool panel so I decided to take the opportunity to gush about it. Hope that's okay. XD)

Here's what happens when an image or video is not mine, is undescribed and/or untranscripted, and it crosses my dash:

I give the first reblog I see of it, by the person I've followed, a like. That was my introduction to the post in question, after all!

I open the notes and start looking for an existing description of the image(s) in the post (or transcript, if it's a video) that I deem satisfactory. If I find one, I reblog that version. Sometimes a description exists in the notes and I deliberately avoid it because I think it's so bad as to be about as useful as not providing one. Usually in such a case there is more than one description I can choose from, thankfully. (This was not the case a few years ago, when image description was... like... less cool or something.)

If I don't find one and I'm up for doing it myself, I do it myself. (I am more likely to be up for doing it myself right now if an adequate description would be fairly simple/short. More on that later.)

If I'm not up for doing it myself and it's a video with open captions, I may be likely to still reblog it. (I do understand that this can still present inaccessible content for deafblind people especially (and also hearing blind people as well, but to a lesser extent).)

If I'm not up for doing it myself and it's a video without captions or an undescribed image, I consider whether or not I want to reblog it. Sometimes I still do. (I understand that this is bad for visual accessibility.)

Those last two bullet points sound TERRIBLE! I'm deliberately choosing inaccessibility when I led with saying I love it?! Hypocrisy!

But here's the thing: I do things this way because in the past those last two bullet points used to be "I don't reblog it until I am up for doing it myself". Yeah, I made a full-on resolution that I was going to make sure all my posts were fully accessible! Great!

...But then it started to actively be a problem, because my workflow went like this:

See post

No description on post or in notes

Draft post to describe later instead of reblogging immediately

Forget draft (my disability makes this distressingly easy to do in Tumblr's last few layouts, more on that in a sec, but you should know I currently have 3292 drafts for all sorts of reasons (mostly not description, I'd imagine), that date back to before I graduated college eight years ago)

Never reblog post

Repeat

Mutuals wonder why I never reblog things anymore

...Which started to actively make my life worse because it was basically like I wasn't on Tumblr anymore.

Which in some ways I'm sure to some sounds like the "I can excuse racism" meme:

...But, like, I mean it was actively interfering with my mental health to a degree, because one axis of my online social life had basically been reduced to nothing. And it wasn't making anything more accessible, when I was completely forgetting to follow through like that.

So I stopped doing that and started letting myself reblog things again, so that I can have some connection to others on this site. XP

There are myriad reasons that someone might not be able to consistently provide image descriptions, but for me, writing an image description requires me to interact with a post in a very specific way, which is a way shared with the following activities:

Writing and timing closed captions

Writing transcripts

Actively monitoring edits and performing admin functions on the handful of wikis I admin (particularly ones without other active admins)

Probably other stuff, IDK, but it's a really weird analytical approach that I don't use for too awful much else

All of these are presently being affected by the fact I've been in disability-related burnout since February of 2020.

I don't provide image descriptions (or transcripts) as often as I used to.

I uploaded a minute-long video to YouTube last week and, as I always do with my content, manually created a caption file for it to avoid CRAPtions; even with YouTube's automatic speech to text and timing, I took twice as long to correct and accurately time the video as I used to take to do a full video of that length back when I was community contributing captions in 2019/2020.

I mostly only wiki admin in the sense that I'm not letting the wikis burn down. A few times for an especially important edit that required admin functions (or AWB to do a lot of little edits faster) I've put together the time and energy to try to get it done.

I cannot get my brain to do it. This is even though I can spend the same amount of time doing something else that I might have used to image describe, because whatever that something else is usually doesn't require the same headspace/skill I need to use to describe.

I'm not going to branch out to the other ways this burnout is affecting me (for instance, at my actual literal paid job), but the fact I've been in it for four years now should... say something. XP I'm slowly digging out, but I'm not there yet.

I'm not going to be like some others I've seen and stamp my foot and refuse to provide descriptions for anyone now because you did this. That would just make things bad for other people. I'd love to provide them more! But I'm not currently in a place where I can do that.

I do understand that by not providing one when one does not exist, I am not doing anything to make the post more accessible, and that I might be presenting some of my followers with content they are unable to access. However, my own current access needs regarding trying to nurse myself out of disability burnout are in direct conflict with being able to regularly provide them. I'd love for that to be over, so that I'm at least describing more often, even if I still occasionally don't describe things.

But in the meantime: If you care about access needs, I'd hope you care about mine, too.

Lastly:

If you meant this link to be for actual information, I regret to inform you (again) that I already know all of the information in it. I've been trying to look at more advanced resources, talk/listen to blind people discuss the topic, attend things about image description (like that panel I mentioned), because useful and understandable image description is very important to me even if it's very difficult for me to do right now, and I'd like to learn all I can. At this point, I need more advanced resources than what you've provided.

If you meant this to be some sort of "own" for the people who gave a note to the post you probably were monitoring to see my reply: [Velma voice] You stop that. Sending it to everyone, regardless of what they said on the post, gives off an air of "look, it's so easy, you're just not trying hard enough!" and makes it seem like you didn't actually read what they said in some cases (like mine, where I shared a very short version of this explanation in the replies where I basically said "image describing good, more people should do it, brain making it hard right now").

For people who agree with the cause of spreading the act of describing images so it's not all on a handful of people, that might not result in anything bad happening (though you might be preaching to the choir, i.e. telling them something they already know). But if someone's less wholeheartedly on the description train, the fact you're sending this to everyone unprompted might come off a bit condescending, and might actually backfire into having them decide not to image describe. (Which is not a course of action I agree with. I think it's silly to purposely choose inaccessibility because a few people were condescending, weird, or jerky about it to you. But it is a possibility, you may or may not be aware.)

TL;DR: Thanks for the link but it's too surface-level for me. I love providing descriptions but some things are making it hard for me right now. I want those things to get better but until they do I'm probably going to be at a lower describing rate than usual. Sorry!

EDIT: Mutual dared me to add a jokey longpost tag I was originally considering tagging this post with so it's now the first tag on the post, lol