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2025-07-22 23:37:18

LoganFive@beige.party

Can someone help me with a dumb question I have about alt text?

If a poster describes their image or video in the post itself, is it still helpful and/or necessary to add alt text? Thanks.

#AltText
#AltTextQuestion
#Accessibility

2025-07-23 01:08:04

Miss Gayle

MissGayle@urbanists.social

@LoganFive

My thought would be put whatever text or description is pertinent to the image in the alt text, but don't duplicate it in the body of the post. Say something unique, or find a different quote to put in the body.

2025-07-23 01:28:05

Logan 5 and 999 others

LoganFive@beige.party

@MissGayle What if this is someone else's post? Should I be boosting an post that has an image with no alt text but the person has done a good job describing the image in the post?

2025-07-23 15:37:48

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Miss Gayle @Logan 5 and 999 others On the one hand, professional accessibility experts say that alt-text must never contain any information that's already in the main text. It's redundant.

On the other hand, these professional accessibility experts only occasionally give advice on how to write alt-text. They never sanction anyone.

Those who do sanction people for not adding alt-texts, who attack them, who mute or block them, who sometimes even tell everyone in the Fediverse to block them for being ableist pigs because they don't add alt-texts, those people may only ever look for that "Alt" badge on an image. They may not care for an image description in the post itself. They may want alt-text, full stop.

You can describe an image in the post all you want. If that image doesn't come with an alt-text that's detailed and accurate enough, you may be toast nonetheless.

I don't say it will happen. But I can't promise it won't happen.

That's why I describe all my original images twice, with a "short" description in the alt-text (where "short" may actually mean 900 characters or more, but Mastodon seems to love long alt-texts) and a "long", fully detailed description in the post itself which contains all necessary explanations and verbatim transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image (where "long" may mean anything from 40 times to well over 100 times as long as a Mastodon toot). I can't do without the latter.

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