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Tune in to episode 25 of the Disability Inclusion: Required podcast.

Disability Inclusion: Required – Episode 25 – The Joy of Access: Alt Text as Poetry

This conversation explores the power of creative and poetic image descriptions to ensure accessibility for people with vision disabilities. Guests Leona Godin and Olivia Dreisinger discuss the concept of “Alt Text as Poetry” and “Alt Text Selfies” as ways to translate visual information into concise yet expressive language. They emphasize the importance of including details like race, disability, and other marginalized identities in descriptions, rather than aiming for an unrealistic objectivity. The discussion also touches on the need to fund and elevate disabled storytellers, creators, and curators to shift narratives away from harmful tropes. Overall, the speakers advocate for a more sensory, multidimensional approach to accessibility and cultural production that celebrates disability as a creative force.

Our podcast theme music is by Andre Louis and Precious Perez. Thank you to Recording Artists And Music Professionals With Disabilities (RAMPD) for connecting these talented disabled musicians with the Disability & Philanthropy Forum.

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Featured Guests

Leona stands next to a large, hyper-realistic painting of her face that has been graffitied by her with ultraviolet paint--—strokes of hair, circles for sunglass lenses, random dots, “There Plant Eyes” on her forehead. She’s wearing black gloves, sheer black turtleneck, round mirror sunglasses, Moses (her white cane) is in her hand, and she’s smiling.

Dr. M. Leona Godin

M. Leona Godin is the 2025-26 Jean Strouse Fellow at the NYPL Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers to continue her work on blindness and photography. She is the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness and the founder of Aromatica Poetica, an arts and culture laboratory for the advancement of smell and taste. She creates multisensory performance journeys exploring the rich potentials of synesthesia and disability aesthetics. Godin’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, ARTnews, O Magazine, and others. Her work has received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, and a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship.

Olivia sits against a plain light grey background. She is a white woman in her early thirties with shoulder-length brown hair and bangs, smiling warmly at the camera. She is wearing a fitted black top with a square neckline.

Olivia Dreisinger

Olivia Dreisinger is a disabled writer, scholar, filmmaker, and PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her own fluctuating abilities dictate how she produces work—a process that regularly leads her to new and generative mediums to explore. Her work often takes a documentary approach. Her current projects are interested in the maternal experience and parenthood: What Kind of Mother is a mid-length documentary exploring her mother’s suicide and her own desires to have children; and “Weaning” is a commissioned art show for The New Gallery that explores her experience with post-weaning anxiety through photogrammetry created images of Dreisinger and her child nursing.