Foolish: You know what? Fit: it's the perfect alibi. "Just a janitor," going through... just to cleaning around everywhere... talk to a lot of people... and you're just bald and such, you know, no one would think twice that you- may be you'd up to something.

Fit: Foolish that's- that's literally the entire point, we've been over this.

Pac: You like the plumber's work, right? You like to get your hand in the plumber's and- do the stuffs, and plumb [makes a very loud popping sound] those pipes, right?

[Everyone loses it and starts laughing]

Pac: I'm sorry- I'm sor- I'm- [laughs] I did- I didn't mean-

Fit: WAS THE SOUND NECESSARY???

Foolish: No, the sound made it.

Pac: I didn't- I didn't hear myself- sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh my god, I'm so shy right now, I'm just gonna sit.

[Full transcript ↓ ]

Foolish: You know what? Fit: it's the perfect alibi. "Just a janitor," going through... just to cleaning around everywhere... talk to a lot of people... and you're just bald and such, you know, no one would think twice that you- may be you'd up to something.

Fit: Foolish that's- that's literally the entire point, we've been over this.

Foolish: Have we?

Fit: I said I'm- I'm trying to find out more about like, the Code Monsters!

Foolish: I thought you just wanted- liked being a janitor.

Fit: Well, I actually do kinda like it, I'll be honest with you, I like getting paid, but-

Foolish: Wait damnnit, Philza's doing it right.

Pac: You like the plumber's work, right?

Fit: Yeah.

Pac: You like to get your hand in the plumber's and- do the stuffs, and plumb [makes a very loud popping sound] those pipes, right?

[Everyone loses it and starts laughing]

Pac: I'm sorry- I'm sor- I'm- [laughs] I did- I didn't mean-

Fit: WAS THE SOUND NECESSARY???

Foolish: No, the sound made it.

Pac: I didn't- I didn't hear myself- sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh my god, I'm so shy right now, I'm just gonna sit.

hello! I've been reading through the resources you've compiled and I really appreciate them! You seem pretty experienced with image descriptions, so I was hoping I could possibly ask you for some advice on how to make my poll tournament more accessible. If you don't have the capacity to help out right now, that's totally fine—let me know if there's someone who you think could better answer my questions!

Anyways, currently I'm running a tournament for poems that are popular on Tumblr (@poetrysmackdown). For Round 1 I just included the images of the poems, which I'd still like to include in future rounds just because it makes it easier to compare side by side, and a few of the poems' precise line structures would be pretty difficult to faithfully replicate on Tumblr. That said, I want to also include text transcriptions in the future rounds for obvious accessibility reasons (and I'm now really wishing I did for Round 1! I didn't realize the tournament would be voted on by anyone besides like ten of my mutuals haha). Do you have any advice on how to format text transcriptions for poems? I'm not sure how best to convey a line break for text-to-speech, for example—should I write it as a "/" between lines, or is it preferable to just write out the poem as I would otherwise? Is it okay if I put the transcription below a read more (some of the poems are quite long), or is that considered rude? I may be overthinking this haha, I just wanna make sure I get it right so everyone can enjoy the poems. I'm attaching two sample poems just so you can get an idea of what I'm working with—thanks in advance!

Not overthinking at all! Before anything else, let me describe the two examples you gave and then I'll put some more detailed thoughts under a read more.

[Image Description: Two screenshots of poems.

The first poem is titled "Scheheraade." It reads: Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again. / How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running / until they forget that they are horses. / It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, / it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, / how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days / were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple / to slice into pieces. / Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means / we're inconsolable. / Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. / These, our bodies, possessed by light. / Tell me we'll never get used to it.

The second poem is titled "Having a Coke with You." It reads: is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne / or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona / partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian / partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt / partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches / partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary / it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still / as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it / in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth / between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles // and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint / you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them // I look / at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world / except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick / which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time / and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism / just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or / at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me / and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them / when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank / or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully / as the horse // it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience / which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I'm telling you about it.

End Image Description.]

Now, obviously I went with the traditional academic rules for quoting poems in the above ID, and I did that because the location of line breaks can be very important in poetry, and that's not always going to translate with a screen reader if you just format it that way. Additionally, if you have someone who sight reads but needs to make the text large, this will often change the location of the line breaks.

I don't know of a good or natural way to convey the right-aligned text in some places via a text description, but if any of my followers do, please feel free to comment!

Capitalization, punctuation, and even font choice are all things that can potentially convey significant meaning in poetry. I opted not to attempt to transcribe those in the above two, but if you're more familiar with the poem and thing those aspects are important in context, you could always make a note about the capitalization. And for things like italics, you could do something like "except possibly for the [italics] Polish Rider [end italics] occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick."

Punctuation is also a tricky one...I tried to keep the description as true to the text as possible, because the lack of punctuation in the second poem defintely seemed very intentional and internal to the flow, but I did add a period at the end of the last poem to give a proper stop between the end of the poem and the "end image description." Your call on how you deal with that, just be aware that not all screen readers are going to pause between lines or paragraphs.

I would generally discourage putting descriptions under a read more, though I do very much understand the concern about length. The formal poem quoting rules above can help condense things space-wise, if that helps.

I also want to encourage alt text! Don't put the entire poem in the alt text of course, but if you put a little blurb in the alt text of each picture, that can signal to screen reader users that it's worth their time to continue down the post. Some screen reader users will simply skip the post entirely when they start hearing "photo, photo, photo," and never even get to the image ID, since it's often not there. Such a blurb could be something like "Screenshot of the poem Scheheraade. See body of post for full description" for the first photo, and "Screenshot of the poem Having a Coke with You. See body of post for full description" for the second.

And finally, just to throw it out there, you don't necessarily have to do a traditional image description the way I did, especially if you provide the supplementary alt text. You could simply transcript the poems too...it's all up to you!

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any more questions, I'm defintely going to follow, this is such a neat idea.

Oh, and one more thing: don't be afraid to let AI help you with this! And I'm not talking about the neural network kind, I'm talking about good old-fashioned optical character recognition. For example, I plugged that first poem into onlineocr.net and got this:

Scheheraade Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable. Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Sure, it required proofreading, a bit of clean up, and of course the line/stanza breaks, but made the process of creating the image description much less effort than it would have taken to type it all out manually. Of course, if you have access to a text version of the poem, that could work even better, but this is a great way to do it if you only have access to the image for whatever reason!