And finally done with the alt-texts for my trip to Japan. In total we are talking about 597 images, only a very small number of which received empty alt texts (because they showed largely the same thing as the previous one from a slightly different angle).

I don’t claim that they are perfect, but they are there! If you don’t like one, send me a better one.

I’m not yet done with the site, I still want to add more regular text, and more notably some videos, but this is a huge step in any case…

I’m proud of it, but my takeaway here really is that it is simply not practical to do like this for a personal site: I easily spent 20 times as much time on getting alt-texts than I spent on selecting the images and if anything that is a very low estimate. It simply doesn’t scale for posting a large number of vacation pictures, with this selection being very much a selection, we have many more images, not all of them good or even that dissimilar from what is there now, but still…

I was originally planning to also put pictures from my previous trip up, but the way this went I don’t think I’ll do that, at least not with fully manually generated alt texts.

I see a lot of complaints about AI-generated alt-texts, but I’m honestly not sure that they are worse than much of what I came up in this case, especially once I do a second path on them to fix any mistakes, in the same way in which I use DeepL for translations: It’s not that they are fully reliable, but they are good enough, that I can focus on the few issues they have and don’t have to do all the tedium that translating everything manually brings with it. And in a lot of cases DeepL does a better job than I would have done: My English is pretty good, but I am not a native speaker, and sometimes that’s noticeable in that my vocabulary is not as comprehensive as it is in German. Maybe the same approach would be fine for #accessibility? I’d be interested in opinions and proposals.

And I am familiar with all the benefits of alt-texts, but since that page is first and foremost a image-site, where not being able to see them will really remove most of the reasons to use it, it also does make me wonder how many people will actually benefit from it, compared to the effort I put in…