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[SPEC] Shouldn't Alt-Text be standarized?

Miguel de Luis Espinosa enteka at fastmail.com

Thu Feb 11 16:26:17 GMT 2021

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As I was reviewing the spec, following Jason McBrayer bit of advice, I came to this part

"Any text following the leading "```" of a preformat toggle line

which toggles preformatted mode on MAY be interpreted by the

client as "alt text" pertaining to the preformatted text lines

which follow the toggle line. Use of alt text is at the client's

discretion, and simple clients may ignore it. Alt text is

recommended for ASCII art or similar non-textual content which,

for example, cannot be meaningfully understood when rendered

through a screen reader or usefully indexed by a search engine.

Alt text may also be used for computer source code to identify

the programming language which advanced clients may use for

syntax highlighting."

Very nice, but what exactly do I put there?


Is there a standard I am not aware of?

If it's up to every client designer then do I need to take a look to what every client programmer thinks is best?

I'd say that the ascii art bit is specially important. I've tried to check how my websites "sounded" though a screen reader and it was often a fine mess. So, I mean, imagine if your first experience of Gemini with all its promise of little else than text was somehting like "eee aa eee oou err comma comma dot ha ha" or something