We all know not everybody functions the same way we do, and some of us have more challenges than your average human. I’m not talking about mental wellbeing, even though it, too, needs to be recognized. No, today I’m talking specifically about difficulties reading and viewing content—a need for good contrast, the help of a screen reader, or just trouble reading tiny text from a smartphone’s screen. While I theoretically know these limitations exist, I’m just as blinded as everyone else to the effect some design choices have when it comes to accessibility, even when I try to include it into my upcoming website. Hence why I call it “half-assed.”
Once, some time ago, I asked a fellow webmaster why they chose to put white text on a black background, as the contrast seemed unnecessarily harsh. Turns out they actually needed the contrast to read said text, whereas my low contrast designs gave them a hard time differentiating between elements and content. That particular interaction stuck with me, so now I’m trying out a hover effect on paragraphs that turns the text color white. Of course, this doesn’t really help mobile readers, as they can’t hover a cursor above text, but the effect also activates when the text is poked at on a screen. I have no idea if this will ever make somebody’s reading easier, but at least the effort is there, right? Eh… I wouldn’t go that far. It’s not really the same than implementing a high-contrast theme into the website by default and having it activate automatically once a user chooses to use it, but I don’t have the coding skills for that. Half-assed effort number one.
The next hurdle is figuring out so-called alt text for the images used to portray and illustrate the text’s content. But how do you describe them? Is it enough to stick to basics—i.e., “a beautiful woman looking into the camera with a smile”—or should you deep dive into details, like “a beautiful female model looking into the camera, smiling, in a field of flowers on a sunny day?”
Of course, this would be easy if I’d be describing your average photographs; however, what I’m trying to portray are fantasy creatures and demonic humanoids. How do you turn “demonic” into descriptictive terms? It’s not just the presence of horns but a whole set of features, starting from animalistic anatomy to all kinds of tails and other non-human traits. Diving balls deep into details would grow the word count into uncomfortable levels pretty soon, so I ask: what do you think is a good balance between necessary and unnecessary description? Is there some personal experience you could share, from either coming up with descriptions yourself or using screen readers? I’d really love to hear some thoughts on this.
I guess that’s it for today, my dudes and dudettes. I wish these posts would be more interesting but alas, my life is pretty boring. Or maybe I just need to get back to working on the various infos I’m procastinating with fiddling with the Discord server and bots. Perhaps they’ll make the next post, since I’m dabbling with stuff I have limited experience with.
As always, remember: be fabulous. Be kind. Be safe.