Is transcribing illegible text in an image necessary or not? CW: long (over 2,000 characters), alt-text meta, image description meta
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(Same content as in this thread, but in one long post.)Just about all alt-text/image description guides that you'll ever come across will tell you that it's
absolutely imperative to
always transcribe
all text within an image verbatim.
All of it. No exception.But not even a single image description guide has ever taken into consideration what'd be if text as it's shown in a picture can't be read, but if whoever posts it
can read the text, e.g. from other pictures or by going to where the picture was made and looking directly at what's shown in the picture.
Like, if text is only three pixels high per line and too small to be read. Or if it's only a tenth of a pixel high and basically invisible, but technically still within the borders of an image. Or a sign or a poster half-covered by a tree trunk. And yet, whoever posts the image knows exactly what's written there, word by word, character by character. So they're capable of transcribing all this text verbatim reliably with 100% accuracy. Yes, even the bits of text hidden behind that tree trunk.
Going strictly by the rule means to transcribe all that text as well. The rule said, "all text in the image." It's text. And it's in the image. So it has to be transcribed. Even if you end up with 50 or more bits of text that need to be transcribed.
I actually do that. I'm not sure if I'll return to transcribing text in pictures in my pictures when it can't even be read in the former pictures already. I've actually done that before, too, at least before my latest image post.
But I still don't know if it's the right way. I still don't know if this is actually required. Because nobody can tell me. Because nobody has ever even taken this into consideration.
Seriously, am I really the first person to ever post an image with illegible text on the Web and try to describe it?
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