@Alt Text Hall of Fame Let's see how well I do with my own descriptions.

Type of imageI usually write something like "digital rendering from within a 3-D virtual world, generated using shaders, but without ray-tracing" in the full description which goes into the post.

Last time, however, I only added the part before the first comma to the alt-text and forgot the details after the first comma. I hope I'll remember to do better next time, especially seeing as I still had lots of room in the alt-text.

TextMost of the time, I transcribe all text anywhere in the image absolutely verbatim down to every last spelling mistake. This ought to be a good example. I even include text that's
[list]so small that it's illegible in the image itselfso tiny that it's essentially invisible in the image itself (character height of half a pixel or less)partly or mostly obscured by somethingany combination of the above[/url] In most cases, the only exception is when I can't decipher text because it's too small or too blurry.

But I just remembered that I got sloppy last time (see Type of image for a link). I didn't mention that the room numbers and the "Office" label are written on the doors of the motel on the advertising poster, let alone in which typeface and colour, and I neither described the license plate hanging above the office door, nor did I transcribe anything on it. I guess I wanted to get this over with. For the same reason, I omitted to describe what can be seen through the open blinds inside some of the motel rooms.

Who is in the imageSince my pictures always come from places that probably nobody who reads this knows exist, namely very obscure virtual worlds, I have to mention who the avatars in an image are, if any, explain who they are and describe in detail what they look like and what they wear.

Also because of this, it's always only myself and maybe also my in-world sister @Juno Rowland who is in the pictures. It'd be too much of an effort to document the identities and looks of two dozen avatars in a party picture and research and explain who they are and what they do. Besides, chances are that some of them teleport out between me taking the main picture and me getting to identify them and take detail pictures for the description.

Setting of the imageThis really takes up a whole lot of characters when I write an image description. It definitely only ever goes into the detailed description in the post, never into the alt-text, also because there's no room for it in alt-text anymore. The last time (again, see Type of image for a link), it took me almost 2,300 characters to explain where the image was made, 800 characters or over 50% more than what fits into alt-text on Mastodon, Misskey and their mutual forks.

But I have to write that much because, again, nobody knows the place where the image is from. So I have to write at which location the image was taken, on which sim, in which grid, in OpenSim, what OpenSim is, what Second Life is, what a grid is, why it's called a grid, what a region is, what a sim is, what a varsim is if necessary, what this specific grid is, what this specific sim is and maybe even what this specific place is. Last time I stopped just short of explaining who Edgar Wallace was because that would have been important for non-German and/or too young readers to understand the name of the location.

Color(s)I try to remember to mention the colour of everything I describe, usually down to the hue. Okay, it was easy last time because it was a picture of a monochrome avatar in a fully monochrome location, save for some very slightly blu-ish or teal-ish hues on the OpenSimWorld beacon which are barely visible in the image, if at all.

Expression and emotionsPass. That's because I quit showing human or otherwise variable faces in my images. And that, in turn, is because there's absolutely no way to hide them from Mastodon users, and some autistic Mastodon users must have such images concealed from them due to the danger of being triggered by eye contact.

But even if I showed faces: Avatar faces are mostly expressionless because it takes special animations triggered either by hand or by script for them to show an expression for a few seconds. So there wouldn't be anything specific to describe.

Item locations and descriptionsI usually go from the foreground to the background, unless the actual background dominates everything (see my second link) in which case I'll start with that. From top to bottom doesn't always make sense; the last time, I would have started with mostly feature-less and completely unimportant off-sim mountains and the sky and then continued with the trees from left to right, jumping back and forth between trees farther in the back and trees farther up front.

Otherwise, if at all possible, I describe everything I can that's at least partly in the image and not fully concealed by something in full detail. I mean, my images consist entirely of stuff that next to nobody has ever come across. And people, including blind or visually-impaired people, might be curious. Besides, regardless whether someone is sighted or not, they might still need extensive explanations to understand certain elements in the image.

Still, it often happens to me that I realise after posting a described image that I've skimped on certain details too much. I think the only time I was halfway satisfied was the last time I broke my own image description length record with almost precisely 40,000 characters for one individual image plus over 1,300 characters for the preamble for both images. It would have been much longer, however, if I had transcribed repeating bits of text and described repeating fabric textures whenever they occurred.

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