On having to describe website preview images automatically generated by Mastodon; CW: long (3,188 characters),
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Looks like you even have to provide an image description for pictures that Mastodon shows as automatically-generated previews of linked websites. I haven't been called out for not doing that yet, but still.
I have four problems with that.
One, I'm not on Mastodon. I'm on Hubzilla which isn't even inspired by Mastodon. I do have the advantage of a post preview button over Mastodon, but such a preview shows what the post will look like on Hubzilla and not what it will look like on Mastodon. This means that I usually can't know beforehand if Mastodon will show a preview image for a linked website, and if so, which image. Hubzilla doesn't generate website previews.
All I could do would be to first submit my post with no description, wait for a major Mastodon instance to receive it and show it, check which image was picked as a preview, if any, then open that image at the highest resolution available, describe it and edit my post, hoping that the edit would make it to Mastodon and replace the version without a description. But until I'm done describing, the post would stand there with no image description.
Two, writing an image description for each website preview image would mean a huge extra workload. No, my image descriptions aren't 150 characters long and done in a few seconds. My image descriptions re-define "detailed". They go far beyond your wildest imaginations. They grow multiple times as long as what fits into Mastodon's alt-text field. So yes, I'm talking about several thousand characters, sometimes tens of thousands of characters.
This also means that if I checked on Mastodon which image would be used as a preview, my post might remain on Mastodon undescribed from the morning when I've posted it to late in the evening when I'm done spending the whole day writing the image description. It has happened to me twice already that describing one image took over 13 hours.
Three, I'm bad at describing images that I haven't made myself. That's why I never answer #
Alt4me requests. Of course, I want to keep a description of an image made by someone else on the same level of detail and quality as those of my own pictures. But I know less about these pictures and their contents. And it's very likely I don't have access to similar sources of information as for my own pictures; all I have is the picture itself. I'd still spend hours describing the image, but the description would be full of "I don't know what this is, I can't see what that is, I can't read this bit of text because it's too small, so sorry, no transcription, I can't even see if there's text on that thing, so if there's text, sorry, no transcription." You can't tell me that's legitimately good style.
Four, in case I was actually successful at describing an image, you'd get a post with a more or less short post text, a link and
a hyper-massive wall of text of thousands or tens of thousands of characters as the description of an automatically-added image that's visible only to Mastodon users. And a "CW: long" content warning just for the image description.
#
AltText #
ImageDescription #
ImageDescriptions #
Accessibility #
A11y #
Inclusion #
Long #
LongPost #
CWLong #
CWLongPost
