Everyday Feminism is so reliably absurd. You know how they caption every single image with a tedious description, out of consideration for people who can’t see images? And how mostly it’s annoying because the image is just an illustration, not something crucial to understanding the content of the post? And there’s no point in giving a verbal description of a non-substantive image that is there solely to provide visual interest along with words? So describing it in words is just seriously futile and silly? Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway – here’s one:
A person sitting at a wooden table and chairs, with bookshelves lining the wall behind them. They are holding a sandwich in one hand and licking the fingers of their other hand.
They’re so keen to be helpful that they pointlessly provide verbal descriptions of images that are there just to break up the text as opposed to providing needed information…and yet…
…and yet…
They describe an image of a skinny dainty young woman with “a person” and “they”…thus leaving the people unable to see images in ignorance of what sex the person holding a sandwich is.
On a site that calls itself feminist.
Lordy lordy lordy.
Comments
13 responses to “Behold: a person”
I though that’s what the “alt” attribute was for — not rendered visibly, but text-to-speech web readers will pick it up.
Ah, I didn’t know about that. I guess Everyday Feminism doesn’t either.
I had just assumed that the latest iteration of html no longer supported the “alt” attribute – for some reason. I mean, it wouldn’t have surprised me.
God, Everyday Feminism always makes me want to barf. Crappy writing and bad ideas; either one on its own is enough to torpedo it, but both together … ugh.
HTML ‘virtue signaling’? They want everyone to know how much they care about those who rely on screen readers that they make it the default for every reader…
Virtue signaling is exactly what it is.
Yes. I hate reading captions to images that describe the image.
@1: They include identical text as ‘alt’ text as well.
I did think that the caption could well be the description of a stock photograph, so googled for it. The results brought up EF and this page only. Then I thought of googling for part of the caption (“holding a sandwich in one hand and licking the”) without the pronouns, you know, as one can’t assume pronouns nowadays – especially Everyday Feminism. It brought up a few links of erotic fan fiction and a link to an old PZ blog entry from 2008. None used the exact text, but was more interesting as glimpse into how google ties the world together…
Here’s the original, “girls like to eat sandwiches”:
http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/girls-like-to-eat-sandwiches-royalty-free-image/480160000
It’s clear from its keywords that they didn’t search for ‘person eating sandwich’. I wonder what magic words they searched for to find them? What they did pick, however, does show EF commitment to culinary diversity – ‘A person’ also likes pasta and pizza:
http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/search/stack/564055347
Like spending thousands to install a wheelchair ramp which will never be usable. The gesture is more important than reality.
Sorbus @#8; you did an image search for ‘holding a sandwich in one hand and licking the’? That could have gone horribly wrong!
Sorbus @8
You are obviously a total geek. Because I did exactly the same thing.
AoS @11: Just a text search until you mentioned it. An image search without inverted commas gives a pretty SFW result. Searching with inverted commas returns that image of Trump and Ivanka from B+W! :-(
Latsot @12: My local library’s archive did a great treasure hunt a few years back using historic images of the borough. It took a few minutes to track down the 20 or so original images using a google reverse image search and then we hiked around to capture present day images from the same spots. It was great fun and my partner and I won a signed series of books. As far as we know, we were the only complete entry and the images were exhibited. I did feel a bit of a cheat until I realised that we were exactly the kind of entrants the archivists were looking for. There was no way they had the time or money to travel round and do it themselves so they outsourced it to an unwitting pair of geeks.