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A screen shot of the focus tool in the alt text editor, you can only clearly see a single frame of a 6 panel comic because the rest is behind a grey fog of war

A screen shot of the previous image in the alt-text editor, showing how even less of image is visible a second time

2026-07-18 15:04:30

EndlessMason@hachyderm.io

So the #mastodon #altText tool doesn't let you view the image without the focal point editor enabled ...

So you have to caption a whole image just dragging around a little circle to make the text in the speech boxes readable

2026-07-19 00:42:48

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@EndlessMason Tip:

Open the image in an image viewer.
Write the image description in a plain-text editor.
Then upload the image.
Lastly, copy-paste the image description from the text editor into the alt-text field.

#AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

2026-07-19 01:29:22

EndlessMason

EndlessMason@hachyderm.io

@jupiter_rowland
That's not very "make it easy for people to do the right thing"

2026-07-19 09:38:17

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@EndlessMason Well, if your only personal digital end-user device is a phone, and your only input device for it is the screen, and you haven't got a text editor installed, and you wouldn't even know what plain-text editors exist for your phone OS, then probably not.

If you've never had a real computer, only phones, and you don't even know that text editors and the concept of copy-paste exist, then even less.

For me, it's both easier and safer to do this; safer in the sense of "I don't have to re-write everything from scratch if something goes wrong".

But I'm not on a phone. Not everyone everywhere in the Fediverse is always only ever on a phone. Some 90% of all Mastodon users may constantly be on phones with dedicated Mastodon apps. But I'm on a Debian GNU/Linux PC. I'm not using an app either (unless you count LibreWolf as an app). In fact, I'm not even on Mastodon. Here on Hubzilla, people are mostly on PCs, and there are no dedicated apps, neither for the desktop nor for phones.

I write all my image descriptions with Mousepad, also so that I don't have to rewrite them in case something goes wrong when I want to send my post. I can even (and often actually do) save WIP image descriptions. It helps that my screen has about 15 times the area of a typical phone screen, and I don't have to type on it.

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