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2025-01-30 14:56:36

Alt Text Hall of Fame via Alt Text Hall of Fame

alttexthalloffame@mastodon.social

@dbloom Thank you for tagging me!

Hmm, I wonder if some of the description should really be just in the text of the post, rather than alt text.

show all 5 comments

2025-01-30 15:25:59

Ángela Stella Matutina

angelastella@social.treehouse.systems

@jupiter_rowland

A browser or client that can't show/copy/translate alt text is broken. It should be replaced not accommodated.

2025-01-30 15:47:30

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Ángela Stella Matutina I'm talking about people who can't access alt-text due to physical disabilities.

People with a strong tremor who cannot move a mouse cursor onto an image and keep it there steadily. They exist. It was one of them who told me that explanations don't belong into alt-text.

Quadriplegic people or amputees. They operate their computers by poking the keyboard with a headpointer strapped to their forehead or with a kind of pen that they hold in their mouth. They have no way of using pointing devices whatsoever. They cannot move a mouse cursor onto an image because they don't have a mouse cursor. They use their computers entirely over the keyboard.

All these people do not necessarily have a way of making alt-text a) appear and b) stay where it is for long enough for them to read it.

If you regularly have a lot to explain in your images, don't put these explanations into the alt-text, just because you've only got 500 characters in your toots. Instead, move someplace in the Fediverse that offers more characters (e.g. Misskey: 3,000; Akkoma: 5,000; Friendica: unlimited).

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

2025-01-30 21:05:59

Ángela Stella Matutina

angelastella@social.treehouse.systems

@jupiter_rowland

That's a GUI problem. As in "having no alternative to GUIs because text-only/no Javascript browsers have been obsoleted by today's Web is fundamentally broken". So stop blaming user choices.

Other than that, keyboard mouse emulation has been widely available for decades at least under Windows and Linux, I thought the point of that were users unable or unwilling to fuck with a mouse/trackpad/whatever the torture device of the week is named?