Year-old image description project picked up again; CW: long (over 4,800 characters), Fediverse meta, alt-text meta, image description meta
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So I've picked up an image description project again that I've started about a year ago. I wanted to publish a series of avatar portrait pictures, each with three or four portraits of my OpenSim avatar on them, always in the same pose, always in front of a neutral background that won't take me days to describe, but in slightly different outfits.
The current status:
As for the short description that shall go into the alt-text, a first experimental draft was written for a picture with three portraits. But it exceeds 1,500 characters, and I don't know what to cut from it. In fact, I'll probably have to add even more characters to explain some fashion jargon.
For the set of long descriptions that shall go into the post text itself, the preamble with explanations and common descriptions was written. But I'll have to re-write it partially. It's ripe with jargon, and jargon must be avoided in image descriptions. If that isn't possible, jargon must be explained all the way down to the very basics until absolutely everyone understands it with no prior knowledge.
The preamble starts with a very short introduction that says what the image roughly shows. It is followed by a description of the visual style, again followed by an explanation what OpenSim is which includes an explanation what Second Life is. I'm currently rewriting this part; I guess it'll end up over 2,500 characters long.
It is followed by a bit over 600 characters that describe and explain the background, including that the neutral, bright white background makes it impossible to discern where exactly the images were made.
The next part is the biggest part of the preamble. It explains how avatars are built in Second Life and OpenSim. It's an info dump with currently almost 10,000 characters that goes all the way down to the basic building blocks in Second Life and OpenSim, and that's likely to grow even longer. This is extremely complex niche knowledge, so I have a whole lot to explain, especially if I want to avoid using unexplained jargon. But it's critical for understanding the following sections, including the visual descriptions. Also, if my readers had to ask me things or look stuff up themselves in order to understand the post, that wouldn't really be accessible.
This part is followed by a general visual description of my avatar, i.e. what all portraits within one post have in common. It includes things from all clothing to the camera position. Right now, it is over 5,000 characters long. It may grow even longer if the terms for certain parts of clothes or shoes count as jargon and need to be explained (shank buttons, Berlebeck-style shank buttons in particular, or the various parts of a men's leather shoe).
One big problem is caused by the shoes. The kind of shoes my avatar is wearing in the images I've started with probably don't exist in real life, so I have to give a fully detailed description of all details, even though (or actually because) these details are actually hardly visible in the images. Right now, the description of the shoes is one paragraph with almost 2,000 characters. Since it contains jargon, it will probably grow even longer, but I'll have to split it into multiple paragraphs.
There are portraits in which my avatar is wearing full brogue shoes. I'm still not sure whether it's common knowledge among blind and visually-impaired people what full brogue shoes are, and what they generally look like.
Also, the first image with three portraits has its individual description. Right now, this part alone has almost 2,500 characters, and it's likely to grow even longer if I have more things to explain. All in all, I plan to have three or four images in each post. I actually have dozens of images of this kind, but I can't shove them all into one post. For one, I don't want too different outfits in one post. Besides, Mastodon can't show more than four images, no matter how many I put into one post, so nobody on Mastodon will even know that there are more than four images. Alternatively, I could write a non-federating article instead of a post and then send a post with a link to the article. But nobody on Mastodon will ever read that.
The other individual descriptions are still unwritten, but they may be shorter since they can rely on not only the preamble, but also the first description.
All in all, I still don't know when I'll be done with describing the images for one post, much less all of them. But what I know is that when I'm done, all image descriptions combined will be as long as a novel.
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