Art of Gravity: Ep. 02 Alt-Text as Poetry and Bojana Coklyat

Podcast  
Host: L Autumn Gnadinger



L Autumn Gnadinger speaks with Bojana Coklyat about the project Alt-Text as Poetry, and web/image accessibility in the arts.

Bojana Coklyat is an artist, disability activist, and one half of the project Alt-Text as Poetry—a workbook, blog, and workshop series dedicated to reimagining our relationship to image description and image accessibility. Alt-text (or, alternative text) is what web users with low vision might use to interpret the content of an image online, and is a (generally underutilized) cornerstone of web accessibility.

Bojana and Shannon Finnegan, Alt-Text as Poetry’s co-founder, take this often utilitarian language used to describe images on the internet and encourage users to engage with it through many of the same tools and freedoms as one would with poetry. The resulting descriptions are then allowed to live on their own, without the image that originally prompted them, not unlike poetry—as simple, but potent art objects.

Notes: 

• Bojana Coklyat
• Read an edited transcription of this conversation here
• Alt-Text as Poetry

• More podcast episodes

12.17.20