How must foreign-language text be transcribed in an image description? CW: long (over 2,200 characters), alt-text meta, image description meta
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I'm pretty sure that posting this will turn out completely futile. But I'll try anyway.
I'm especially asking the Mastodon alt-text enforcers:
How must foreign-language text be transcribed, both by Web accessibility standards and by Mastodon's alt-text standards?Let's assume I have some text in an image that's in a different language than the post and therefore in a different language than the image description. But I still have to transcribe it.
Now, according to image-describing rules, text must always be transcribed 100% verbatim. Word by word, character by character, exactly identical to the original in the image.
Here's the catch: Screen reader software may not be able to reliably switch the language in which they read out text in the middle of a description. They definitely cannot switch the language in the middle of an alt-text, I know that, just like they cannot navigate within alt-text.
This means that if I describe an image in English, but there's French text somewhere, a screen reader may read it out as gobbledygook instead of proper French. It may read the French text like it's English.
But even if the screen reader did read out the French text in proper French, someone who doesn't understand French won't understand the text.
This leaves me with two options:
- Transcribe the foreign-language text verbatim, add a translation afterwards.
This would make the foreign-language text understandable, but it would also produce gobbledygook. - Give a translated transcript of the foreign-language text that's as close to the original as possible.
No gobbledygook, but I'd break the rule of always transcribing text verbatim.
The latter option would produce weird results if applied to a sign with essentially the same text in French, English and German where the French and German texts translate into something that slightly differs from both each other and the English text. I've happened upon this before.
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