Why was this wiki made?

This wiki was made for three reasons.

Reason no. 1: There are lots of guides about alt-texts and describing images on the Web. Some handle certain special aspects, mention certain special rules or give certain special advice. But none of them has ever gathered all these aspects, all these rules, all these advices in one place. But if people need to know all of these, they'll have to find them all in one place.

So I created such a place.

Reason no. 2: Most of these guides are only about making webpages or blog posts accessible. You can tell them because they keep rambling about HTML as if it's normal because it is normal to their target audience: (professional) Web designers and (professional) bloggers. A few guides also handle social media, but that's almost always limited to the big corporate silos: Facebook, Instagram, 𝕏, LinkedIn and so forth. Only very few guides mention the Fediverse, but what few of these exist all limit it to Mastodon.

There wasn't a single place anywhere on the Web that talked about alt-texts and image descriptions in the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. For example, none of them even gave a remote idea about what it's like if you're on Friendica or Hubzilla with virtually no character limit, but you still have to cater to the accessibility requirements defined by the Mastodon community in order to reduce the backlash when not doing so to a minimum.

Also, there wasn't a single place anywhere on the Web that even considered social media or social networks with a four-digit, five-digit or even higher character limit into consideration, places where you can describe and explain images at length in the message text, unhindered by tiny character limits, in spite of them falling under social media.

So I created such a place.

Reason no. 3: I kept having to explain certain aspects of describing images and writing alt-texts to people especially on Mastodon who kept doing these wrong. I simply grew tired of having to explain the same stuff over and over and over again. I wanted to write it once, along with links to references so they won't think I've made it up on the spot, and then give people a link to it.

So I started creating such explanations and gathering them in a wiki.