If I were to describe images like over the phone, I'd expect feedback like over the phone; CW: long (over 2,000 characters), alt-text meta, image description meta
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Allegedly, a "good" advice for image descriptions is always to describe images like you'd describe them to someone on a landline phone.
Sorry, but that's non-sense. At least for anything that goes significantly beyond a real-life cat photo.
If you describe an image through a phone, you describe it to
one person. Usually a person whom you know, so you've at least got a rough idea on what they need described. Even more importantly, you can ask that person what they want to know about the image if you don't know. And you get a reply.
If you describe an image for a public Fediverse post, you describe it to
millions of Fediverse users and
billions of Web users. You can't know what they all want, nor can you generalise what they all want. And you can't even ask one of them what they need described before or while describing, much less all of them. In fact, you can't ask at all. And yet, you have to cater to everyone's needs the same and throw no-one under a bus.
If I see a realistic chance that someone might be interested in some detail in one of my images, I will describe it. It won't be in the shorter description in the alt-text; instead, it will be in the long description which I've always put directly into the post so far, but whose placement I'm currently reconsidering. If something is unfamiliar enough to enough people that it requires an explanation, I will explain it in the long description.
Right now, only meme posts are an exception. They don't need as much of a visual description as long as I stick to the template, and a poll has revealed that people do prefer externally linked third-party explanations over my own ones blowing the character count of the post out of proportion. This is the one time that I can safely assume that I actually
know what most people want.
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