toki pona helps you write better alt text
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. this translates to "Bee is eating fried seaweed. star is enjoying it." that's all that's really needed to explain the image. often i see alt text that would go on about the texture of the seaweed, the look on my face, the fact that i was sitting, etc etc etc. that's stuff for image descriptions[2:1]. the thing with toki pona is that explaining all that in the language gets extremely unwieldy. here it is in toki pona.
soweli Pi li moku kasi telo seli
ona li awen li jo kasi suli
selo kasi li len li kule laso pimeja
soweli li suwi li kule loje
monsi soweli li linja wan tu
selo kasi li moku pona
bee is eating fried seaweed. star is sitting and the fried seaweed is huge. the seaweed is dark green and looks like fabric. bee is cute and orange. behind bee is three tails. the seaweed is yummy
you can see with some of the alt text and image descriptions out there how this may get unwieldy.
toki pona is actually way more accessible to learn then klingon, to a point that makes me very annoyed ↩︎
image descriptions and alt text are different, the later is what is attached directly to images that will be automatically read out by screen readers. these need to be short as ironically screen readers are not good at dealing with long content in it. the former is a longer passage along side an image in text form, which allows for more controls for screen readers to use and allows for longer descriptions. these should not be confused and serve different purposes ↩︎ ↩︎