If you spend any real time on Mastodon, you will discover that some people take their #AltText very seriously indeed, and some may wonder "Why?".
Mastodon tries to be a place for all people, where everyone can have a voice, connect with like-minded people, and catch up on news and current events, regardless of ability. There are many vision impaired people who follow me now, and I try to make sure that my #AltText serves it's intended purposes.
Here is my approach.
Imagine you are describing the image to a friend with perfect eyesight, but is sitting out of view of the picture, like a friend on the other side of your desk who can't see the screen. Tell them the point of the picture, why it's there, what it means in context to the toot.
This example photo may have alt text as follows: A colour photograph of a black Steinway Grand Piano, with lid open and keyboard of black and white keys exposed. The branding "Steinway & Sons" can be seen written in gold above the keys and on the side of the piano which sits on gold coloured wheels, off-centre in the photo to the right, upon a red wood herring bone patterned floor. A white cornice separates the floor from the grey wall behind the piano which only takes up about one third of the entire frame of the photo.
This kind of description is overkill if none of that description is relevant to the original toot, especially if you were explaining this toot to a sighted friend.
@dgar As one of the many blind people that follow you, thank you. It makes my heart sing to know there are people out there commited to making this place more inclusive.
@dgar I think more rather than less is always better. I don't know what it is to be blind. So do blind people know about cornices or herring bone? Well now there is something they may learn.
@dgar It always takes me some time to figure out how describe images, and it just clicked earlier today than I can use AI to get a baseline description for my images and just tweak as necessary (my post about the stickers is a perfect example).
@dgar I’ve been wondering to which degree visually impaired people appreciate a bit of flair. The real visual sense provides a lot of it. A picture speaks a thousand words. Novels tickle the senses by giving vivid descriptions. But that’s obviously not the same as taking inventory with indiscriminate detail. I’d say most alt texts should be pretty sparing, the same way toots are in general to us sighted people.
Since then, I changed my name handle to only letters (no special signs, no earth pictograph) and payed extra attention to what I attached to my tweets. And, I am imagining what I would like to know about a picture, if I couldn't see it. Or, try to explain it to a friend on the phone (landline, no video possible).
What is very sad is, when people just put their text from the toot above into the #AltText and think that would be enough. No. It is not.
For a few days now I am contemplating a toot about this topic.
I usually take the effort to describe in detail what is in a photo. Once on the Bluebird site I read a tweet from a blind person who asked for better descriptions in #AltTexts and explained also what screen readers are capable of and what not - for example, if there are only emojis in the handle/nickname of the tweeter, the screen reader cannot say what it means.
@dgar To use my recent experience as a sighted person, imagine your instance administrator accidentally let the SSL certificate expire for the media server but you're still scrolling mastodon and are too lazy to click through to load the media from the original server on every toot :)
@dgar
I've sort of gone the other way, the context of what is pictured is always in the post, so I've been trying to just accurately describe the picture in case there is context or interest that I don't see.
I have been describing a lot of kites lately. Sometimes I feel foolish saying "a small red kite on a blue, partly cloudy, sky", but a lot of people with vision issues were not blind from birth, so maybe they want to know that the kite is red?
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