Alt text proved unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images - The Washington Post
A team that included writers, designers, scientists and educators worked together to put together the package of images the public saw, and the alt text was not an afterthought, Rhue said. He said the team had a relatively short period of time to produce those descriptions. He only saw the photos a week before the public did. But they had spent the previous two years discussing accessibility and working with a consulting agency to create an alt text stylebook. During that process, they practiced writing descriptions and learned what didn’t work. “I had thought that brevity was a really important thing. That’s a common misconception,” Rhue said. He pointed to the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” and said the recent images required more words than that to fully capture them. “There were more than 1,000 words written about each of those pictures, and we could keep going.”