sjmarf

sjmarf, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Some people rely on ‘screen readers’ (software that reads text on the screen out loud when you move your finger over it) to browse content on Lemmy. Some screen readers can read text on images (I know Apple’s does, not sure about Android), but obviously it can make mistakes and there’s missing context a lot of the time. Hence the transcriptions.

There was a group of people on Reddit who added image transcriptions in the comments of posts but it was rarely seen in the post itself. I quite like that it’s been more popular on Lemmy. For inline images you can add hidden transcriptions using markdown, but for image posts it has to go in the body of the post.

There are also a couple of other benefits. The post is more likely to appear in search results if someone searches for text included in the transcription. And if the image fails to load for whatever reason, or the image host deletes it, you can get the gist from the transcription.