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2025-05-31 23:59:09

elaterite@mastoart.social

The idea behind #AltText is to describe an image for visually impaired people.

Simply saying the image is a "flower," a "white flower," or a "daisy" tells the person who relies on Alt Text--to enjoy their social media experience--very little.

The idea is to create the image in their head: A color portrait of several white flowers with many pedals in a flat circular shape & bright yellow centers on long green stems. One flower is in sharp focus while the surrounding flowers are softly focused.

show all 13 comments

2025-06-01 00:59:49

Hal

hwine@vmst.io

@elaterite I appreciate your efforts on your alt texts. While I am sighted, your words paint a picture, and highlights what _you_ saw in the picture. Which may be different than what I saw, so we've had a "mini dialogue" on your art.

2025-06-01 07:08:50

Big Pawed Bear

bigpawedbear@masto.nu

@elaterite imagine you are describing a picture to someone while talking to them on the phone, and they can't see the image. was one way I heard of explaining how to do good alt text. what would you want that person to know to give them as fuller mental image of what you are seeing.

2025-06-01 09:10:02

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Bob Tregilus Of course, this means that the more obscure the content of your image is, the more in-depth you will have to go. At worst, there's nothing in your image of which non-sighted people know what it looks like unless you describe it. Simply mentioning that it's there is not sufficient.

My own original images aren't even photographs, nor are they pieces of art that represent real life. They're renderings from 3-D virtual worlds, very obscure 3-D virtual worlds even. Nobody knows what anything in these world looks like unless they can see it in my images. At the same time, however, chances are that they become so curious about these virtual worlds that they also become curious about everything in the image, not just what matters within the context of the post. That is, sometimes the image itself as a whole is the context. Either way, this means I can't just focus on certain elements in the image in my descriptions. I have to describe everything.

So I've gotten to a point at which even filling the alt-text character limit forced by Mastodon, Misskey and their respective forks (they cut longer alt-texts off at the 1,500-character mark) doesn't cut it. All my original images have two descriptions now. In addition to the one in the alt-text that's very limited, there is another one in the post that's more or less fully detailed, that contains transcripts of all text within the borders of the image, and that also comes with all explanations that I deem necessary. Since I don't have a character limit to worry about (the limit is defined by the database field rather than a hard-coded or configurable number), this description is likely to grow well over a hundred times longer than typical alt-text.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

2025-06-01 09:16:56

Bob Tregilus

elaterite@mastoart.social

@jupiter_rowland I hear you. I have posted a couple of images that are hard to describe. All we can do is do our best. :)

2025-06-01 09:18:02

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Big Pawed Bear @Bob Tregilus I beg to differ. You can't realistically do that in a Fediverse post as I've pointed out here (that's actually a Fediverse post that you may be able to search for and find it on Mastodon).

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

2025-06-01 09:19:53

Big Pawed Bear

bigpawedbear@masto.nu

@jupiter_rowland can't realistically write anything into a text box describing an image? what? if there is no place for alt text, then that is the programmer's concern, I was talking about how to write alt text in the most amerssive way possible.

2025-06-01 09:35:34

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Bob Tregilus Only that "my best" has actually led to unimaginable extremes.

They say an image is worth a thousand words. I've once described one image in over 10,000 words. Over 60,000 characters. The post is so long that, I think, Misskey and its various forks have rejected it, as have Pleroma and Akkoma. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to describe that one image, in-world research included.

And I actually had to limit myself. For once, I did not give in-depth descriptions of the images within that image, especially not beyond what's actually visible in these images. That's because I've discovered that if I were to do that, I'd have to describe dozens of images in one particular image (in my image) and potentially over a hundred images in these, even though they're so small that they're technically invisible. It would have taken me months to write all that. And it would have been futile anyway. My character limit is over 16 million, but Mastodon rejects posts over 100,000 characters, and in the few places that do accept posts with millions of characters, next to nobody cares about image descriptions.

I haven't posted a new in-world image in over half a year. I've been working on-and-off on the descriptions for a series of rather simple avatar portraits since last autumn.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

2025-06-01 09:46:54

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Big Pawed Bear I'm not talking about the technical side.

That is, you may not have noticed, but I'm not posting from Mastodon. I'm on Hubzilla where things are quite a bit different. Images aren't file attachments; they're embedded into posts in-line using BBcode markup like in classic bulletin board forums. Alt-text has no dedicated text entry box; instead, it's manually woven into the image embedding code.

No, what I mean is that here in the Fediverse, you can't describe an image like describing it to a friend over the phone. Open the link in my post. (If it looks like it may be a link, it actually is one, even if it isn't a URL in plain sight. I can do embedded links on Hubzilla, too.)

Anyway, if you describe an image to a friend over a landline phone with no image transfer, your friend can talk back. Your friend can even talk back before you start describing. You can ask your friend what they need to know, what they want to know. You can do that beforehand. And then you can describe the image in exactly the way that your friend needs.

In the Fediverse, you describe your images for potentially millions of Fediverse users and billions of Internet users. You can't first go around and ask them all, every last one of them, what they need to know and what they want to know. You have to perfectly cater to everyone's needs without even knowing anyone's actual needs because you can't know everyone's needs.

Describing for one person over the phone is one-size-fits-one. It's tailor-made for one person. Describing in the Fediverse has to be one-size-fits-all at first try, right off the bat.

This may not matter if you post a simple real-life cat photo. But I post renderings from super-obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Nobody knows what anything in my images look like until they can either see the images themselves, or I describe everything in these images to them. So this matters a whole lot in my case.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

2025-06-01 09:48:18

Bob Tregilus

elaterite@mastoart.social

@jupiter_rowland Well, I do what I can within reason. I'm very dyslexic and writing is difficult. I don't have an hour or more to spend on Alt Text.

2025-06-01 11:18:29

Big Pawed Bear

bigpawedbear@masto.nu

@jupiter_rowland if your alt text image descriptions aren't rendered well by other platforms due to the platform you use, then that's the programmer's issue, and needs consensus across platforms, and is not the describer's problem. the way I described how to write alt text is only one way. if you have another that works for you, then use it.

2025-06-02 09:05:56

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Big Pawed Bear Again, I'm NOT talking about the technological side. I'm NOT talking about how certain platforms are rendering alt-texts.

I'm talking about describing an image for one person whom I know vs describing an image for billions of people whom I don't know. That's a huge difference.

Let's suppose I've rendered a picture in a 3-D virtual world. A very obscure one. (Because that's what I normally do.) Chances are people won't get that image without explanations, simply because they don't know anything about these worlds.

If I want to describe that image to my friend Joe over a landline phone, I can ask Joe what he knows about virtual worlds, and whether he needs some explanations first.

If Joe says yes, he'd like some explanations, I can take a deep breath and explain away. If the explanations go too much in-depth, or if they become too big an info dump for him to handle, Joe can stop me while I'm explaining.

After explaining, I can ask Joe what I shall describe to him. Only what's important? Everything because Joe is super-curious about these virtual worlds, and he wants to know all the details so he can imagine what that virtual world looks like?

And Joe can answer. If Joe answers that he does not want a super-detailed description of everything, I don't have to give him a super-detailed description of everything. And if my description becomes too detailed, Joe can rein me in and tell me to stop.

If I want to describe that image when I post it in the Fediverse, it's very different.

I post it to not one person, but to many persons. Potentially billions of them, namely everyone with an Internet access.
I cannot ask them all what they need explained before I start describing. Especially, I cannot ask everyone of them individually what they need explained.
In fact, I can't even know beforehand who will receive my image post.
Still, I have to cater to everyone's needs all the same. I have to do so immediately without being explicitly asked to do so. And people's needs are different.
Lastly, they cannot talk back while I'm describing/explaining. If my explanations go too much into detail, they cannot stop me in the middle of my explanations. Besides, someone somewhere out there might actually need my explanations in their entirety.
The same goes for the visual descriptions. Some may want or need every last detail in the image described in-depth because they're so curious about the topic. Others may only be interested in what they think or what I think is important in the image. But they can't stop my super-detailed describing of absolutely everything in the image for those who want or need it. Even if they could, it'd be unfair towards those who do need a full, detailed description.

The result: I have to deliver the maximum right away. I have to start with a whole lot of explanations because someone somewhere out there probably won't understand my image without these explanations. And then I have to continue with an extremely detailed visual description because someone somewhere out there may want or even require one. Regardless of what everyone else wants.

It's like describing an image to Joe over a landline phone, but I don't know Joe, I don't know what Joe wants or needs, I don't even know that it's Joe on the other end, there may be other people around Joe's phone who want to hear the description, too, and someone has cut off the microphone in Joe's phone first, only to re-activate it after I'm done describing the image three hours later.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

2025-06-02 09:10:59

Big Pawed Bear

bigpawedbear@masto.nu

@jupiter_rowland so to cut a long story short, do the best you can with what you have, end of.

2025-06-02 11:55:46

Robert Kingett

WeirdWriter@caneandable.social

@bigpawedbear @jupiter_rowland This is the best way, when in doubt, is to describe it as if you are talking on the phone with someone as you continue to describe things, your descriptions will change and will refine. They don’t need to be perfect they just need to be authentically yours. We are perfectly capable of appreciating and understanding that not everybody is the same so not everybody will describe this same either. It’s pointless to try to get a perfect description