As many an avid looker of my site may know, i frequently use the constructed language of toki pona, its a language designed in 2001 with the goal to have as little amount of words as possible, to be extremely simple but not so that it limits the ideas you can share with it. in this sense i think its been wildly successful, even if its very much a niche thing and i wouldn't be surprised if more people knew klingon then toki pona^[1].

but as i have become more confident in it through both teaching others and also through using it more myself, especially in alt text, i realize it has made me way better at making alt text in any language i know!

an important skill in alt text is being able to pick out the important parts of the image and describing that in a short and sweet way that still gives enough context to understand the image. this is of course especially hard for art, as art is a complex thing and that's why some people often write image descriptions^[2] for art too. however alt text is still super important for artistic images because you need to actually explain what is in the image.

this is where toki pona comes in! in toki pona, sentences are very simplified because of a pretty strict grammatical structure. there are no run on sentences, explaining things in detail gets wordy, and with alt text you need to keep it under a paragraph! ideally not more then two lines!

for example my recent art kasi telo seli has the alt text soweli Pi li moku e kasi telo seli. ona pona a.