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Thu, 25 Jul 2024 17:18:49 +0200

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Passing on opportunities to take pictures because I couldn't sufficiently describe them; CW: long (almost 600 characters), image description meta

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Thu, 25 Jul 2024 17:26:48 +0200

volkris

volkris@qoto.org

@jupiter_rowland this is a fine example of how folks pushing too hard for image descriptions end up leaving us worse off in the end.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, right? It’s far better to have pictures without descriptions than to have no pictures at all.

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 17:41:47 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@volkris In the case of the pictures I post, I guess everyone would profit from a description except for a few dozen people in the Fediverse who actually have at least a rough idea what I've posted there.

I guess the actual issue is image description/alt-text standards that assume that all pictures fall into maybe half a dozen categories, and my images being edge-cases that lead to absolutely enormous descriptions if the standards are applied too them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 17:49:58 +0200

volkris

volkris@qoto.org

@jupiter_rowland well, what I’m saying is it’s one of those cases of a false choice.

The choice is NOT a binary of descriptions vs no descriptions. The no images at all choice looms really large.

Nobody profits if there are no pictures.

So the good intention to help some ends up with the outcome of helping nobody.

It’s an unintended consequence.

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:19:49 +0200

NorVegan

norvegan@zotum.net

I don't really understand what the big deal is with image descriptions, is it for blind people to understand what's going on?

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:30:05 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@volkris

he no images at all choice looms really large.

People can do without my images.

Nobody profits if there are no pictures.

But nobody is discriminated against either.

And I'm neither lectured for not doing something that I've previously taken to greater extremes than anyone else in the Fediverse, nor am I attacked for being ableist, nor am I being muted or blocked for not providing accessibility.

Spending two days on a 60,000-character image description neatly hidden behind a Mastodon-style content warning is less likely to get me lectured, attacked, muted or blocked than not providing any image description.

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

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 18:59:08 +0200

volkris

volkris@qoto.org

@jupiter_rowland I get it.

One reason I wanted to speak out here is specifically to counter those people lecturing.

I know they have good intentions, but they might be doing more harm than good because they don’t see the bigger picture.

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 19:10:22 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@NorVegan It's originally about so-called alt-text. Alt-text is short for "alternative text", and it stands for a written image description that takes the place of the image itself for blind or visually-impaired people as well as when your mobile Internet is so bad that images won't load.

Mastodon's goal is for everyone everywhere at least on Mastodon to always add a sufficiently useful alt-text to absolutely every last image they post. In fact, the Mastodon community wants everyone everywhere in the Fediverse to do that, but there are no "this percentage of images on this instance has alt-text" stats for non-Mastodon instances.

There are certain standards for alt-text and what it must and must not contain, although whether they're recommendations or hard requirements is debatable. However, it seems like parts of Mastodon have even higher standards for what needs to be in an alt-text than those many "how to alt-text" guides written for static Web sites, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

As for length, alt-text guides that are not explicitly (also) for Mastodon often state that alt-text must not be longer than 200 characters.

Mastodon has a hard alt-text limit of 1,500 characters. Some Mastodon users love to exceed the 200-character recommendation several times over. They're usually applauded for the effort. This taught me that Mastodon loves detailed image descriptions.

Also, even professional Web designers, of whom there are plenty on Mastodon, never complain about alt-text in a Mastodon toot being too long. This initially taught me that such a thing as too long image descriptions don't exist for Mastodonians.

Now, the thing is that I don't post cat photos, nor do I post newspaper clippings or Twitter screenshots. If I post a picture, it almost always has to do with certain 3-D virtual worlds. The very system that these worlds run on is already so obscure that only one in over 200,000 Fediverse users knows it. Thus, the worlds themselves and the places in them tend to be even more obscure.

However, we're talking about something that's being referred to as "metaverse". That has been referred to using the term "metaverse" since as early as 2007.

So on the one hand, nobody knows that stuff. On the other hand, the revelation that there's a free, open-source metaverse (or network of metaverses) that's as decentralised and federated as Mastodon is likely to have people on the edges of their seats in utter intrigue, eager to suck up all information about it that they can possibly get.

Maybe it's actually only the revelation that there's a metaverse out there that's working well enough that it's possible to share pictures from it. Or it's because it looks a great deal better than Zuckerberg's Horizons ads.

Whatever it is, there are loads of people out there who don't even know the absolute basics about these worlds, but chances are they want to know everything about them.

Now, a third thing I've learned over time is that it's highly inconvenient for people to have to look up something in order to be able to understand an image or its description. All information necessary to understand the image or the description must be delivered with the post itself.

So when I first applied the general quality standards for alt-text or image descriptions to my own images while taking all of the above into consideration, I discovered that I'd have to both describe and explain a whole lot.

My first attempt ended with over 11,000 characters. The longest image description ever posted in the Fediverse by magnitudes. I wasn't satisfied with it, I managed to source some missing information, I edited it, and it ended up over 13,000 characters.

At this point, I didn't know what to do with so many characters. All my options looked bad.

Put them into the alt-text? Not even Hubzilla can render that many characters, not even on a 4K screen rotated to portrait. And Mastodon, Misskey and their forks will chop everything beyond the 1,500-character mark off.
Put them into the post itself? That'd ruin the post.
Put them into a Hubzilla article and link to it? That'd be inconvenient. I've actually been told later by a blind Mastodon user that Hubzilla articles apparently don't work with screen readers anyway.

After trying all three plus a variant with only a fairly short description in the alt-text, it looked like putting the full, detailed image description into the post was the best option after all, in addition to putting a shorter description into the alt-text so that there's an image description where Mastodon expects one and demands one.

That 13,000+-character image description is now hopelessly outdated after I've learned a whole lot more about describing images. It has been superseded by new descriptions of new images with more advanced descriptions, most of which are even longer.

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:23:31 +0200 zuletzt bearbeitet: Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:27:29 +0200

NorVegan

norvegan@zotum.net

Edit: Are emoji reactions meant to just be posted as comment like this? I would've thought it would be attached to the post, similar to a like. Seems a bit pointless to just leave emoji comments, if I wanted to do that I could pretty easily paste on in myself...

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 07:54:50 +0200

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@NorVegan Yes, they are.