Alt text helps the visually impaired experience the James Webb Telescope images

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

The celestial images captured by the James Webb Telescope and shared by NASA almost defy description – almost but not quite.

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

A team of scientists, writers and educators wanted visually impaired people to be able to appreciate distant galaxies and blazing stars, too.

TIM RHUE: Space is for everyone. It shouldn’t matter who you are.

FADEL: That’s Tim Rhue. He’s an education specialist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. His team wrote descriptive labels using the alt text feature on social media apps, which is designed to make the internet more accessible.

MARTIN: That way, a person using a screen reader would hear a description of an image. Alt text also helps when images on a web page won’t load. Here’s how one picture was labeled.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: A starfield is speckled across the image. They range from small, faint points of light to larger, closer, brighter and more fully resolved stars with eight-point diffraction spikes. The upper-right portion of the image has wispy, translucent, cloud-like streaks rising from the nebula.

FADEL: Like most of us, Rhue was astonished by the images the Webb captured, and he and his team wanted that astonishment to be shared by all.

RHUE: This is definitely a labor of love. There are so many things that make life difficult for people, but this is just pure joy, the universe out there.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: A large, translucent, red oval surrounds the central stars. From the red oval, shells extend in a mix of colors. The shells appear to have a filamentous pattern similar to the surface of a cut citrus fruit.

FADEL: These alt text descriptions are being celebrated online.

RHUE: We love seeing people’s face light up. We love seeing people really get the big picture and our place in it all.

FADEL: A picture now made just a little bit clearer for all of us.

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