also, for what it's worth, I just looked at your icon descriptions, and I think you strike that balance pretty well (although that might be because you work coming up against the character limit). The one piece of information you have on several of those that might be worth leaving out is information like "an image" or "a painting". Screenreader users do know that what they're hearing descriptions of our images, so you never need to prepend that. Type of image, such as "painting" or "cartoon" is something you should only include if you think it's going to be informative in the brief context of a userpic description(which of course, sometimes it will be, which is why this is an art and not a science). Otherwise, getting across the content, words, mood, or whatever else is the primary thing you are expressing to sighted users is what you are going for.