Somewhere I still have a Christmas plate from kindergarten where we had to draw a picture and they somehow turned it into a plastic plate. All the fingers of each hand come out of a single point. Spooky.
But this, it’s a simple word-replacement joke, instead of pencil you in it’s crayon. I like cartoons and jokes, but they’re tough to make art of, mainly because of the limitations of alternate text. Describing a joke feels wrong, but it also takes a lot of words.
There are lots of web comics, and as I understand it most don’t bother that much with alternate text because it’s sort of beside the point, but it also feels like:
- Lots of accessibility users miss out on some funny content.
- Having alt-text would make the future of AI-generating art from alt-texts way cooler.
Expanding on the second point, if I used those artificial intelligence image generator sites, I could pull my alt text for this image and see what they come up with. That could be fun, but it would also give some idea of their sophistication—whether their output even vaguely matches the described image.
It was also a lot of fun scribbling out the low-stakes stick-figure drawings, though I probably could have found a better way to give them that crayon-drawn texture.