Alt text as Poetry

To mark the recently passed International Day of People with Disabilities, the GENDER.ED team want to highlight the Alt-text as Poetry initiative between artists Bojana Coklyat and Finnegan Shannon, and specifically its efforts to reimagine access through creativity, generosity, collaboration, and play.

Alt-text is the text that is written to accompany images and to elaborate on them for people who might be reading them with screen readers that won't pick up on an image and are usually imagined as written for people with low/no vision or cognitive disabilities. For most of us who often write public-facing text (this blog would count as an example) or even who use social media that allows images to accompany text posts, writing alt-text can seem like the one step you can "skip" to post faster and with less effort. It's seen as something additional that we do, and not as an integral part of how we present material to our diverse audiences. 

I encountered the alt-text as poetry project when I was teaching in a small liberal arts college and was immediately struck by its approach to alt text as a creative and poetic endeavour rooted in generosity and play. The project invites people to write alt-text as poetry. As the artists remind us, this is not about moving away from describing images that are of actual use to those who need to have them in a specific form; it is about spending time and energy in thinking about how this could be more than a quick technical writing.

With my students in my Introduction to Gender Studies class, we often did the workshop that accompanies the project: https://alt-text-as-poetry.net. Students shared and exchanged images and texts, and the group work helped us spend us time on images and text to think how we might convey some of the feeling that accompanies our encounters with images. It was also wonderful to think about how the same image might be conveyed differently by students, and that uniqueness was a reminder of the human labor that is involved in reinterpreting images and enlargening access. Here's the website for the project: https://alt-text-as-poetry.net