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2025-07-04 08:42:43

audreygwinter@dice.camp

Here I go sticking my neck out again.

#AltText is a good idea. It doesn't hurt anybody, and it helps a lot of people. So why don't I bother with it?

Because nobody is satisfied with it, no matter how you write it. "Use alt-text! No, not like that!" Bah. If it bothers you that much, please do write some for anything I share. I welcome it.

2025-07-04 20:46:01

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Audrey Winter Some people say, "Just write alt-text. It takes you a few seconds, and everything is better than nothing." Often enough, however, when you actually show them your alt-text, they decide that that is not better than nothing.

In fact, you increasingly rarely see this come from the alt-text police of the Mastodon HOA. They have minimum quality standards. They're ready and willing to enforce these standards, and they already do. However, they don't communicate their minimum quality standards with each other, and so their individual standards may contradict each other.

Also, people say you don't have to satisfy everyone. The same people, howevery, may insist that you have to fully satisfy them specifically. And if everyone says you have to fully satisfy them, then you do have to satisfy everyone.

For example, some may want you to describe everything of which they don't know what it looks like, but they're curious about what it looks like. Expecting them to ask for details is so bad and ignorant that it's easily considered ableist. No, you have to deliver everything they want to know on a silver platter right away, either in the alt-text or in the post text, but not someplace entirely else.

My images consist of stuff that next to nobody knows what it looks like, including fully sighted people the very second before they see the image. So I spend hours upon hours describing every last nitty-gritty detail in my images, and I write two descriptions for each image because I can't fit a full description into 1,500 characters.

And then someone else may come and sanction me for writing too long descriptions. I only expect this not to happen too often because most Mastodon users nope out when they see in the summary and CW that my posts are tens of thousands of characters long. Which means over 500 characters.

That's all also because alt-text and image descriptions only matter on Mastodon (and Pixelfed which is basically a Mastodon satellite), and Mastodon is terrible for discussions due to its lack of support for threaded conversations, much less groups. Thus, next to nobody ever actually discusses image descriptions, and most people are completely unaware of the existence of opinions and attitudes concerning image descriptions that are different from theirs. And so those who enforce image descriptions only enforce their own ideals, and those who post images must cater to contradicting requirements.

I've actually started working on a wiki on how to describe images and writing alt-texts for the Fediverse. And even I must admit in the wiki that my sources contradict each other, and so do certain elements of describing images.

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