Alt-text as Poetry
with Shannon Finnegan
Friday, April 24, 2:00PM - 3:30PM Eastern Time via Zoom
Common Field Convening Online
FREE
Alt-text is an essential part of web accessibility, making visual content accessible though short textual descriptions for blind and low-vision people who use screen reading software to access digital content. Alt-text is often overlooked altogether or understood through the lens of compliance, as an unwelcome burden to be met with minimum effort. How can we instead approach alt-text thoughtfully and creatively, while still prioritizing alt-text as an accessibility practice? In this workshop, led by Shannon Finnegan and developed in collaboration with Bojana Coklyat, we will reframe alt-text as a type of poetry and practice writing it together. We will look at examples of poetic and creative approaches to alt-text, then do several writing exercises designed to focus on issues that often come up in alt-text, including attention to language and word economy, alt-text as translation, structuring and prioritizing, subjectivity, identity, and representation.
Session Presentation (PDF)
Writing Prompts & Discussion Questions (Google Doc)
Further Reading (Google Doc)
Shannon Finnegan is a multidisciplinary artist making work about accessibility and disability culture. They have done projects with Banff Centre, MCA Denver, Friends of the High Line, Tallinn Art Hall, Nook Gallery, and the Wassaic Project. They have spoken about their work at the Brooklyn Museum, School for Poetic Computation, The 8th Floor, and The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. In 2018, they received a Wynn Newhouse Award and participated in Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency. In 2019, they were an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam. Their work has been written about in C Magazine, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and the New York Times. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
The Common Field Convening is a national itinerant gathering that brings together 500+ visual arts organizers from across the country to share resources, ideas and methods for artist-led, artist-run, and artist-centered spaces, projects and practices. The goal of the convening is to develop local and national peer connectivity, to build knowledge from the field and create a growing set of resources to share broadly. The project connects and incorporates the urgent interests, themes and issues of the national Common Field network with the issues, contexts, and conditions specific to Houston. Common Field is a national network of independent visual arts organizations and organizers that connects, supports, and advocates for the artist-centered field. Founded in 2013 and launched in 2015, the Common Field network has 750+ members across 43 states.
Access note: Common Field will be live captioning sessions. The registration process allows participants to indicate if they have any additional accessibility needs and Common Field will do their best to provide it.