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2026-05-15 22:22:01

jecture@mastodon.social

Most devs treat alt text as a checkbox. Mark Wyner's Portland talk on May 27 goes deep into phonetics, composition, complex image sources, and the parts that make writing good descriptions genuinely hard. If you've ever typed "image of a person" and moved on, this one is for you.
#accessibility #alttext #screenreaders

https://pdxa11yux.org/events/2026/05/27/alt-text-is-the-ocean-you-thought-was-a-pond.html

2026-05-15 23:29:13

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Jecture I'm already taking tons of things into consideration when writing descriptions for my images, especially my original images.

Avoiding line breaks and keyboard double quotes in alt-text. Not exceeding 512 characters in alt-text because Misskey and its forks will automatically delete alt-texts longer than that (only from my newest image posts on).

How to describe positions. Shapes. Dimensions. Colours. People (in my case, 3-D avatars). Their gender. Their shape. Their skin tones. Their outfits.

Which texts to transcribe (in my case, literally every bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image). How to transcribe multiple-paragraph texts. Acronyms. All caps. Misspellings. Text in different or multiple languages (I'm still not sure how to do that in a way that neither clashes with "text must always be transcribed 100% verbatim" nor with "screen readers must be able to handle the transcript properly").

My audience (not my target audience, but whom I have to expect to be my actual audience). What they know about the topic that my images show (usually nothing). What they may want to know. How easy it'd be for them to obtain that information without my help (not at all).

Where I post my images. Where people will or may see my image posts. The cultural differences between the Fediverse and a) corporate social networks/media as well as b) "non-social" websites and blogs. The technological differences, e.g. character limits, their limitations or lack thereof and their cultural implications. Even technological differences within the Fediverse because I post my images somewhere that's very very different from Mastodon.

I'm working with over 50 different references for writing alt-texts and image descriptions; here's the list including links.

It takes me from hours to days to describe and explain one image, also because each one of my original images requires two image descriptions.

I'm actually working on gathering everything I know about alt-texts and image descriptions in the Fediverse in a wiki.

And yet, I've got the feeling that this event, if I were able to attend it, would render things even more complex for me and every single one of my previous image posts even more embarrassingly outdated than they already are.

I've got the image descriptions for a series of avatar portraits as works in progress since late 2024. With the extra knowledge from this event, I might have to largely rewrite them yet again and put even more work into them than I already did.

That is, on the other hand, I've got a feeling that "tackling social media" won't even touch the Fediverse. Or only Mastodon as if the Fediverse wasn't more than that.

No advice on how to describe images if your post ends up someplace where good, manually written, accurate, sufficiently detailed image descriptions are mandatory, and you're basically expected to flesh out the character limit of 1,500 per alt-text while only having 500 for the post itself. But if, at the same time, the place where you actually compose and post your image posts, does not have any character limits to worry about, so you do have the technical means to put a full, long, detailed extra image description into the post itself.

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