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2025-06-20 03:13:27

dandylover1@someplace.social

2025-06-20 13:49:44

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Georgiana Brummell Isn't the A2I post quite a bit out-dated?

Some two years ago, I've read about screen readers not supporting more than 200 characters in alt-text. But people who actually use screen readers told me that all screen reader software available has long been upgraded to support an infinite number of characters. And next to nobody uses old versions with a 200-character limit anymore.

And now I often see posts and articles, even recent ones, mention a hard limit of 125 characters for alt-text in screen readers. This must actually be leftover information from the mid-2010s at best.

Case in point: I've never seen anyone in the Fediverse being criticised for what would be absolutely excessively long alt-text by Web design standards. Proof enough that screen readers can easily handle 800 or 1,000 or more characters of alt-text.

As far as I'm informed, the only issue is that screen readers cannot navigate alt-texts, i.e. you cannot rewind to a certain point within an alt-text and have it re-read from there. You can only jump back to the beginning of the alt-text and have the whole alt-text re-read. The longer an alt-text is, the less convenient this is.

By the way: I've started working on an entire wiki on how to describe images properly and write image descriptions in general and alt-texts specifically for the Fediverse. It will take quite a number of existing guides and how-tos and the like into consideration and link to them. It will also take both Mastodon's culture and the special perks of the various places in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon into consideration. When guides contradict each other, I'll mention that as well.

It has to be a wiki because it will contain so much information that it simply wouldn't fit onto one page anymore. Also, I want to be able to point people at certain aspects of describing images or writing alt-texts such as how colours should be described, why people's races should never be mentioned and why explanations do not belong into alt-texts. I don't want to tell them to scroll down to a certain paragraph. I want to show them one page that specialises in that particular topic.

I'm not sure if that's utter overkill, if that'll stand in the way of just "doing it" and actually drive people away from describing images. But in my opinion, someone has to tell people how to do it properly.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #A11y #Accessibility