There’s a sentence that will make some people flinch before they’ve even finished reading it: How to sell knickers to blind people. The flinch is the point. It exposes an assumption that usually sits unexamined beneath “accessible design”: that blind people are not really consumers, but recipients of kindness. Beneficiaries. The politely desexualised audience to whom information is given, not desire invited.
This article is about that assumption, and about why it quietly breaks both accessibility and marketing.
Let’s start with the image. A woman stands in a doorway wearing a red long-sleeve top, black high-waisted briefs, white socks, and green knee-high boots, lit by strong sunlight. That sentence is standards-compliant alt text. It does exactly what WCAG asks of it. It tells you what is there, clearly, and efficiently. No mood. No inference. No story. Then it steps aside.
Now let’s look at the same image described differently:
A woman stands in a sunlit doorway of a stone house, half in shadow, half in bright afternoon light. She wears a fitted long-sleeve red top paired with black high-waisted briefs, white socks, and dark green knee-high wellington boots. Her long black hair falls loosely over her shoulders. One hand gently lifts the hem of the top, the other rests by her side. She looks off to the side rather than at the camera, her expression calm and self-possessed. A wreath hangs on the door behind her, and strong sunlight casts sharp, graphic shadows across the scene, giving the image a confident, quietly festive feel.
This is not WCAG alt text. It is what we came to call “vibe text.” It is connotative, not denotative. It is not trying to be neutral. It is doing what the image itself is doing for sighted viewers: creating atmosphere, modelling a way of being in a body, inviting identification.
Both texts describe the same photons. They do radically different cognitive work.
Alt text is a bridge. It exists to prevent exclusion. It answers the question “what is here?” and then politely gets out of the way. That restraint is not a failure; it is the feature. Alt text is meant to disappear after it has done its job.
Vibe text is not a bridge. It is a room. It invites you to stay.
Here is where things get uncomfortable. If you believe blind people are essentially asexual, or at least not the kind of people you market underwear to, then alt text is perfectly adequate. You have fulfilled your obligation. You have done a good deed. You have been inclusive in the charitable sense.
But if you believe blind people are adults, equals, and consumers—people with money, taste, desire, and agency—then adequacy is not enough. Adults are not satisfied with product labels alone. Adults are courted. Adults are addressed as people who might want something, not merely understand it.
This is not about replacing alt text. That would be a category error and a legal one. WCAG exists for good reasons, and alt text remains non-negotiable. The mistake is asking alt text to do a job it was never designed to do, then declaring accessibility a failure when it doesn’t sell knickers.
Selling knickers is affective work. It is about how it feels to inhabit a body wearing the thing. Stripe & Stare are not running a public information campaign. They are selling softness, comfort, confidence, ease. The image is not there to inform; it is there to persuade. It models a future self: relaxed, unbothered, self-possessed, at home in her own skin.
Sighted users get that message instantly, pre-linguistically. Blind users do not—unless someone does the work of translating the function of the image, not just its contents.
This is where AI becomes interesting. Large language models are extremely good at generating rich, layered descriptions when given both the image and the surrounding post text. In this case, the vibe text was written using the image and the brand copy together. That matters. The description did not invent meaning arbitrarily; it inferred the same meaning a sighted reader would likely take away.
Used carelessly, that power can absolutely go wrong. Over-interpretation, projection, emotional certainty where ambiguity should remain—these are real risks. That is why “human in the loop” still matters, especially where stakes are high.
But refusing to use that capability at all because it feels unsafe leads to a different failure: a world where blind people are technically informed but culturally excluded. They know what the image contains, but not why it exists.
There is a deeper irony here. Equal access to persuasion means equal exposure to marketing, aesthetics, and yes, manipulation. That makes people nervous. But that nervousness reveals a lingering paternalism. You do not get to call someone an equal and then only offer them the nutritional label while everyone else gets the seduction.
The ethical move is not choosing between alt text and vibe text. It is using both, deliberately and in the right places. Alt text to unlock the door. Vibe text to acknowledge that once inside, blind readers are not guests at a charity dinner but participants in the same messy, desirous consumer culture as everyone else.
Accessibility that refuses to engage desire is not neutral. It is infantilising.
Stripe & Stare do not need alt text to sell knickers. They need alt text, so no one is excluded from the room where selling happens. The selling itself—the atmosphere, the confidence, the sense of “I want to feel like that”—belongs elsewhere, and it belongs to everyone.
Once you see that distinction clearly, the conversation about AI-written image descriptions stops being about compliance and starts being about craft. And craft, unlike charity, takes real thought.
That, quietly, is the point.
Fact check.
The alt text and extended visual narrative (EVN) where written by GPT-5.2, the following is the description produced by Gemini 3 (Think) for comparison:
“This image features a woman posing in a doorway, creating a blend of cozy indoor elements and rugged outdoor attire. The overall aesthetic has a rustic, seasonal feel, likely inspired by countryside or "English cottage" fashion.
Subject and Composition
The woman is the central focus, standing in an open white doorway of a stone building. She is posed with one leg slightly bent and a hand resting on her hip, looking off to the side. The lighting is bright and natural, casting soft shadows that highlight the textures of her clothing and the stone wall to her right.
Outfit Details
Her ensemble is a mix of high-comfort and practical outdoor gear:
· Top: A vibrant red, long-sleeved crewneck sweater that provides a bold pop of colour against the neutral background.
· Bottom: She is wearing dark, high-cut briefs.
· Footwear: Classic olive-green Hunter rain boots (wellies) paired with thick white slouch socks peeking out from the top.
Background and Setting
The environment suggests a rural or festive setting:
· Doorway: An arched white wooden door with a small window at the top. A greenery wreath or swag is hanging on the door handle, adding a touch of winter or holiday decor.
· Architecture: The exterior wall is made of rough-hewn light-coloured stone, and a traditional black lantern is visible on the right side.
· Ground: The threshold consists of a weathered wooden step leading out onto a stone or concrete patio.”
