Right. There's been a lot of talk about #AltText and it's place here on the fediverse of late.
Whether you're blind, deaf or sighted, I'd be curious to not only have you fill out the relevant choice, but feel free to respond to this with more detail if you like.
Do you make use of, benefit from or even find alt-text useful, whether for images or audio?
I thank each of you from the bottom of my heart, also anyone who takes the time to read my poems
Unfortunately the rhymes are lost in the english translation and so is the rhythm
Who knows german, please read the german
Or help with the translation? 🙏🏼😊
#AltText The rain The rain, it washes everything away, The sorrow and the pain that's there. Standing in the rain, hoping and praying. That washes clean, this gloomy life. The questions an answer find, the rain and tears combine. That a solution will arise, The doubts are now forgiven. That washes clean, the guilt the heavy. The darkness now fades away, the sun is reaching me. That probing questions, that never asked, the answer to which, will now decay. That washes itself clean, What only the rain can wash clean. That questions that weigh down my heart, No longer deny me life. That the future, so uncertain, Will be bathed in the light I miss. That washes clean what torments my heart. Now take me with you, wash me away. Let me forget this terrible place. The mistakes that bind me today in the past they disappear. Since gloomy now my life, I can only give you the darkness in the rain. And yet and yet, I still hope to find the brightness. To fathom with you the friends here, to join the rain with the sun's beauty. Together we can then say there, the rain it washes everything away. Washes everything now infinitely pure, Now I know, with you, my heart is never, never alone.
Hm. I wonder if I can get any fediverse admins onboard to disable all images on their instance on the World Sight Day in October, so that only alt text shows up.
😂 😂 😂 😂 😂
I can't stop...
I can't stop laughing....
The sexual innuendo is too much to handle....
😂 😂 😂 😂 😂
So clearly you couldn't make it more ambiguous....
😂 😂 😂 😂 😂
So I go on #Twitter and what jumps out at me....
A robot video of a special kind....🤦♀️ 🤦♀️
Tesla and the robot test...
Yes, yes there car seats are tested for their "longevity"....
Yes, even Ikea does that...
With all the new folks joining here, I thought I should lay out a couple guiding posts for #AltText. I hope it will give everyone something to consider going forward, and I strongly encourage everyone to use this tool. It engages those like me, who have been shut out of entire conversations in the past because we couldn't follow along due to an absence of described images. #A11y#Advocacy
Need #AltText help on 2 images of exposed #Pretendians - one who tried doing smear campaign, when I spoke out about how she abused me, my family & using social media to con/manipulate ppl. She's dangerous & recruits naive young POC, vulnerable older POC, vulnerable white gals into sex work. 2 of my friends experienced this with her & they didn't believe my early warnings, til they were abused by her & abandoned in a town they knew no one.
If you can help me, let me know. Dangerous person.
In brief: I'm still not sure how much #AltText is optimal. And I tend to run into situations in which alt-text that describes everything in a picture will grow longer than any of you could possibly imagine in their wildest dreams.
Here's my situation:
I don't have a problem with writing a lot. Unlike most of you, I'm not on a phone. I'm on a desktop computer, and if I'm not, I'm on a laptop. I've always got a full-blown hardware keyboard, and I can touch-type with ten fingers. And I like to rant.
I'm on #Hubzilla. This means virtually no limit in post length and especially virtually no limit in alt-text length. The only limiting factor would be how much alt-text the instances where my posts are viewed can display. #Mastodon has a hard cap at 1,500 characters, for example.
I'm not the one to skimp on #accessibility rules unless they're technologically impossible for me to follow. I'd rather do too much than too little. This includes full transcriptions of all texts in a picture unless privacy issues speak against it, or unless I've got no way to source the original of a text anymore, and said text in the picture is ineligible even for me. Yes, I transcribe text that's one pixel high if I can get the original.
When I post pictures, I don't always post them Instagram/Pixelfed-style, i.e. posts that are about this particular picture. Instead, I often use pictures to illustrate the post. Hubzilla gives me all necessary means to write full-blown blog posts with all bells and whistles as regular posts. Describing a picture in the visible part of a post when the post isn't about the picture is horribly bad style. Doing so when there are multiple pictures in one post, regardless of whether Mastodon puts them in the right places (which it doesn't), is even worse.
I usually post pictures taken in #VirtualWorlds. In comparison with pictures taken in real-life, they have a much higher tendency to contain things that need to be described, often to both sighted and blind or visually-impaired users, because they simply don't know them, be it objects, be it locations. It's one thing if a picture was taken on Times Square, and it's something else if a picture was taken in a place of which maybe not even five people in the whole Fediverse even know that it exists. Thus, more text is needed.
Now there are two schools of thoughts when it comes to alt-text.
One: clear and concise alt-text. Only describe what's necessary in the context in which the picture is posted. Screen readers can't handle long alt-texts well. You can't navigate alt-text with most screen readers, i.e. you can't stop it somewhere, rewind it to a certain point and listen to parts of it once more. All you can do is let the screen reader rattle down the whole alt-text in one chunk. If you need to hear it again, you have to hear all of it again.
The obvious downside of this is that most of the content of the image is lost to everyone who isn't sighted, and some is lost to those who can't identify it even by looking at it in that particular picture.
Two: full description of absolutely everything in the picture plus explanation if necessary. Denying non-sighted people the chance to experience everything that's in a picture, and be it through words, can be considered ableist. Also, tiny details that are barely visible in the picture could be described so that sighted people can identify them.
And besides, there's the idea that alt-text can help everyone understand what that is that they see (or don't see) in that picture if they're unfamiliar with them.
As I've said, extensive image descriptions in the visible part of a post may be okay when the post is about the picture, but not when the picture illustrates the post and even less when there's more than one picture illustrating the post.
Yes, this is a thing. Just read what @Stormgren wrote earlier this month.
Alt-text doesn't just mean accessibility in terms of low -vision or no-vision end users.
Done right also means accessibility for people who might not know much about your image's subject matter either.
This is especially true for technical topic photos. By accurately describing what's in the picture, you give context to non-technical viewers, or newbies, as to exactly what they're looking at, and even describe how it works or why it matters.
#AltText is not just an alternate description to a visual medium, it's an enhancement for everyone if you do it right.
(So I can't find any prior post of mine on this, so if I've actually made this point before, well, you got to hear a version of it again.)
And I'm actually waiting for Mastodon users to refuse to boost posts that contain pictures with insufficient alt-text. Many refuse to boost posts that contain pictures without alt-text already now.
The obvious downside of it is: "DESCRIBE ALL THE THINGS" + lots and lots and lots of stuff in the picture + just about everything needs to be explained because nobody is familiar with any of it = alt-text the size of a rather long blog post.
I've tried that with this picture (no embedding although I could because reasons). I've written a detailed alt-text. I've spent more than three hours in-world in a preserved, static copy of this place, researching and transcribing text where probably none of you would even know that there's text otherwise. The picture alone wasn't enough of a source for an alt-text that I would have deemed sufficient.
Only description plus some transcriptions: 7,636 characters. Description plus everything transcribed, save for the big black panel in the middle background behind the tree which I couldn't transcribe because it no longer exists in-world, plus translations of everything that isn't English plus everything unfamiliar explained: 10,985 characters. If that panel had still existed in-world, and I could have transcribed it, I might have passed the 12,000-character mark. With an image description.
As I've said, Hubzilla doesn't have a hard cap for alt-text length. In theory, it could handle and probably display alt-texts much longer than this. I don't know how it'd display an alt-text of that size in practice, whether it'd be scrollable, whether it'd have a time-out before anyone could read it fully etc. Mastodon, in the meantime, has the hard cap I've mentioned above which probably also cuts alt-texts coming in from outside. That's where most of my audience is. And screen reader users might have no other choice than to sit through their screen readers rambling down alt-text for more than five minutes in one go, especially if they could get a hold of the original alt-text instead of one cropped at the 1,500-character mark.
Now, even though I'll probably kick off two separate threads, I'd like to read your thoughts about how detailed alt-text should be.
The @AltTextHealthCheck bot that tracks the percentage of images that were posted with a description has been running for about three months now. So I looked at the data it collected.
Not trying to call out anyone in particular, I see a lot of people doing this, but I'm really curious and would like to understand this better.
Folks who use vague alt text with your images ("a funny book cover", "photo of me outside"), what is your thought process? Is the image description intended for sighted people? Or maybe your admin made alt text mandatory? Or maybe that really does seem sufficient.
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.
What if Mastodon had a way to save the ALT text you entered each time you used a new image. So if you used the same image later, it would some how know what you used the last time and give you the option to automatically use that instead of having to type something each and every time.
Seems to me there would be some way to be able to do this easily and to save all of us time from having to type the same thing for ALT text on a regular basis.
I’m sorry but the interface for adding alt text (image descriptions, which all images should have) on mobile is terrible in most apps. Here is tumblr and the Mastodon app. 👎 #mastodonsupport#mastodonapp#alttext
(please do not reply telling me to use desktop, I do, it’s great, or with other work-around suggestions. I just posted the names of 30 insects using OCR and a host of other tools— I’m the queen of work-arounds! the point here is that “accessibility” shouldn’t be an afterthought!)
Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale 🎶 , a tale of a fateful trip, 🎶
that started from this #Halifax port,
aboard this tiny ship (canoe, actually).
So we're back, let me tell you how our day went?
There's only one high tide today, and it was sunny and fairly warm, so we took the canoe out fishing.
Here's what it looked like when we left 🎵 for a three hour tour. ⛵
If you do a lot of cutting and pasting (like pasting things to multiple social media networks), access to your clipboard history is incredibly helpful.
I've started using Raycast on my Mac, and it feels life changing, especially for including #AltText.
Before, I created a temporary doc where I put my post and the alt text for the image. Then I had to go back and forth, cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting.
Now with three keystrokes I can access both pieces of text.