-

2025-04-27 16:42:37

simon_brooke@mastodon.scot

Sometimes #AltText is so woefully inadequate as to be positively insulting to those users who depend on it. Yes, I have a particular post in mind. No, I'm not going to give it the oxygen of publicity.

show all 4 comments

2025-05-04 17:54:12

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Justin Derrick The question, however, is: What is "high-quality"? How is it defined?

Would the bot go by the definition valid for commercial/scientific/technological websites and blogs, i.e. ideally no more than 125 characters, and only a short and concise visual description with no further information?

Or would the bot go by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's standards, i.e. the longer and more detailed, the better, any and all extra information is welcome in alt-text (because it doesn't fit into the toot), and the limit is 1,500 characters?

That is, if it were for me, the bot would go look both for alt-texts and for image descriptions in the post text body and judge both. Because I do both at the same time for my original images. An extremely detailed long image description in the post itself (character limit for post and alt-texts combined here: over 16 million) that also comes with all necessary explanations and transcripts of all text in the image, plus an alt-text that's as detailed as 1,500 characters (minus notification about the long description in the post) allow, but with no explanations, and I usually have to leave out text transcripts as well because they're too many.

You may say the alt-text is superfluous if it's just a much shorter version of the long description. But as long as the Mastodon HOA demands there be an alt-text to every image, no matter what (especially seeing as I always hide my image posts behind summaries/content warnings, so you can't see right of the bat that there's a long image description in the post), I add alt-texts to my original images.

I'm actually curious about how the bot would judge my descriptions. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it notices that the bits of text in the image are not transcribed in the alt-text. Maybe it'd be irritated because I have headlines in my long image descriptions, because they're so long that they need two levels of headlines. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it goes strictly by WCAG, and a) the alt-texts exceed 200 characters, b) long image descriptions do not belong into the text body by any known official accessibility standards, and c) neither my alt-texts nor my long descriptions are limited to what's supposed to be important within the context of the post.

Anyway, in the meantime, you can follow the account @Alt Text Hall of Fame and the hashtag #AltTextHallOfFame.

CC: @Simon Brooke

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

2025-05-04 23:58:09

Simon Brooke

simon_brooke@mastodon.scot

@jupiter_rowland a picture is worth a thousand words, they say. Well, if it is, it will take far more than a few hundred characters to write a thousand words, and if it isn't, why post it?

Seriously, I often write quite terse #AltText; but at the same time I know that friends of mine who depend on alt text enjoy it far more when I write more extensively.

No useful illustration can adequately be described in 145 characters.

2025-05-05 01:22:27

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Simon Brooke Depending on what kinds of images you post, you'll need many more characters than what accessibility experts declare the absolute maximum for alt-texts.

My original images are renderings from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds, as rarely as I post them. This is something practically nobody knows anything about, but it might still make people very curious regardless. Potentially curious enough for sighted people to completely ignore the context in which I've posted an image and take closer looks at all the details in the image instead. So from what I've learned about describing images generally and specifically for a Mastodon audience over the last two years or so, and from what I could deduce from that, I came to the conclusion that virtual world renderings require extremely long and detailed image descriptions, also because the images must also be explained so that everyone understands them.

In general, it's the most convenient if an image post also delivers all information necessary for everyone to understand it with no prior knowledge and without having to look anything up. I know that it isn't even possible to look everything up that's necessary to understand my images, and even if it was, that'd still be highly inconvenient and time-consuming.

However, this means that the proverbial "thousand words" actually aren't nearly enough for my long descriptions. I'd have to deliberately cut down on details in my images and avoid elements that need their own explanations to even stay under 2,000 words.

My personal record is an image description of over 10,000 words. Over 60,000 characters. Two full days of researching, examining and describing, morning to evening. It takes a screen reader several hours to read out. All for only one image. And I actually had to limit myself and what I'd describe. For a change, I did not go as far as giving full, detailed descriptions of all images in my image or even descriptions of images in images in my image. In addition, there's also an actual alt-text of precisely 1,500 characters, a bit over 1,400 of which describe the image very briefly and incompletely for my standards.

And I still think it's fully justified to describe images like mine with that many words, and that at least someone somewhere out there actually needs descriptions at this level of detail for the kind of images I post.

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