PSA: That $40 screen reader I tested changed my view on alt text

I spent $40 on a demo version of NVDA last month just to see how my designs actually sounded to blind users. Turned out my carefully written alt text was reading out loud like garbage because I was cramming in too many keywords. Now I write short, clear descriptions and test them with the tool first... has anyone else actually listened to their own designs?

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alicebarnes1d ago

Oh man, this hits home so hard. I did the exact same thing last year, I grabbed a free trial of VoiceOver on my Mac and ran it over my portfolio site. I thought I was being so clever with my alt text, describing every little detail like "a smiling woman in a blue blazer stands in front of a whiteboard with colorful sticky notes and a laptop open showing a chart." But when I actually heard it read out loud it was this endless run on sentence that just made me cringe. So I stripped it down to just "team brainstorming session in an office" and it sounded way better, like a human actually talking. It sucks realizing how wrong you were but it's also kind of freeing to just let go of all that extra junk.