sorry, snark does not help with my desire to improve accessibility in the wild.

I really didn’t mean to be snarky. Maybe if I was speaking, my tone would have made that more clear, or I could have worded it differently.

“Why is this here? What am I trying to say?” are super important things in design and also so easy to lose track of.

What would you put for this? "Graph of All-Transactions House Price Index for the United States 1975-2025"?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI

Charts are one I've wondered about, do I need to try to describe the trend of the data, or provide several conclusions that a person seeing the chart might draw?

Just saying "It's a chart" doesn't feel like it'd be useful to someone who can't see the chart. But if the other text on the page talks about the chart, then maybe identifying it as the chart is enough?

What are you trying to point out with your graph in general? Write that basically. Usually graphs are added for some purpose, and assuming it's not purposefully misleading, verbalizing the purpose usually works well.

I might be an unusual case, but when I present graphs/charts it's not usually because I'm trying to point something out. It's usually a "here's some data, what conclusions do you draw from this?" and hopefully a discussion will follow. Example from recently: "Here is a recent survey of adults in the US and their religious identification, church attendance levels, self-reported "spirituality" level, etc. What do you think is happening?"

Would love to hear a good example of alt text for something like that where the data isn't necessarily clear and I also don't want to do any interpreting of the data lest I influence the person's opinion.

An image is the wrong way to convey something like that to a blind person. As written in one of my other comments, give the data in a table format or a custom widget that could be explored.

> and hopefully a discussion will follow.

Yeah, I think I misunderstood the context. I understood/assumed it to be for an article/post you're writing, where you have something you want to say in general/some point of what you're writing. But based on what you wrote now, it seems to be more about how to caption an image you're sending to a blind person in a conversation/discussion of some sort.

I guess at that point it'd be easier for them if you just share the data itself, rather than anything generated by the data, especially if there is nothing you want to point out.

It depends on the context. What do you want to say? How much of it is said in the text? Can the content of the image be inferred from the text part? Even in the best scenario though, giving a summary of the image in the alt text / caption could be immensely useful and include the reader in your thought process.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/ including how write alt text for charts.

a plaintext table with the actual data

Charts would have a link to tabular data. It’s the “business illustrations” that are more about understanding purpose.