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2025-10-08 09:17:19

hosford42@techhub.social

@mwt @yon @jessamyn @PepperTheVixen I like to imagine I'm literally describing the picture to someone over the phone so they can imagine it as accurately as possible, including both low-level details and high-level gist. It makes for vivid and detailed descriptions that help to faithfully reproduce the experience of actually looking at the picture.

2025-10-08 16:35:30

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Aaron I've found that describing an image to someone over a screen-less landline phone doesn't work when describing an image in the Fediverse.

Self-quote-post that should explain why:

Jupiter Rowland schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Fri, 04 Oct 2024 23:30:02 +0200

You can't describe images in Fediverse posts like over the phone

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.

@accessibility group @a11y group

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility

That does not mean, however, that I don't describe my images. In fact, I haven't posted a single image in over a year due to the humongous effort that I put into describing my images.

(Content warning: eye contact!) This was my most recent image post. It's from July last year. It took me eight hours to write over 20,000 characters of image description for two images, consisting of a common preamble and two individual descriptions. One image is actually intentionally kept very simple, and both descriptions share certain elements so I didn't have to write them twice. These 20,000 characters went into the post, right below the images (the character limit where I've posted these images is over 24 million).

Afterwards, I took another hour to distill two short descriptions for the alt-texts from the long descriptions. The first alt-text has exactly 1,500 characters, 990 of which are image description. The second one has 1,499 characters, 989 of which are image description.

And this wasn't even my most extreme example. But it's the least outdated.

From what I've managed to gather about Fediverse and especially Mastodon culture, especially Mastodon's alt-text and image description culture, I came to the conclusion that images from within 3-D virtual worlds need such extensive descriptions. I'm not even on Mastodon myself, but Mastodon users receive my image posts.

CC: @MWT @四 @Jessamyn @PepperTheVixen ΘΔ

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