@neil I gotta tell you, Mastodon for mobile, alt text is really hard to add. The little keyboard pops up right over the box I'm typing in so I can't see it, and it's tough to edit any typos.

After 5 minutes of fighting with it, my last post got "bare minimum" alt text.

@neil I work with web content people and the advice I always give them is to consider why they chose that photo. What are the relevant details? Describe those in the ALT text.

It has a side-benefit that they are more thoughtful about what photos they choose. Before, they never would've considered the "why" at all.

@neil What a pitty that they don't explain the guidelines.

For example:
"Avoid using periods, commas, or other punctuation marks unless necessary for clarity."

I'm really interested in the reasons for this. And does this sentence mean I should use less punctuation than in a grammatical correct sentence?

@neil it takes practice, I’m getting better, still poor. it is an interesting practice. I’ve gone from terrible to crappy but I will write better alts

@neil I never know how much detail to give. I often take screenshots of text; should I mention that some of it is bolded and some of it isn't, or that the headline is larger than the body text, or...?

@neil Mine either tend to be much too brief (not wanting to describe every single one of my 20+ plushes sitting on the laundry drying rack) or way too in-depth (going as far to describe the clothing of a character) because idk what's actually relevant

I feel like providing alt text is so much easier when posting images of daily life because anyone has a basic understanding of that

Vs providing some for images of videogames, anime, and other random "weeb shit" nobody but me cares about 😅🫣

@neil how do i disable this option on mastodon

@neil I am sighted but often read the alt text after gazing at the image for a couple of seconds. Good descriptions enhance many pictures, jokes, etc

@neil I’m sighted, but I read very often the alt text because being neurodivergent I don’t always get easily what is in the image. 😊

@neil thanks for this

@neil this is exactly what AI should be doing. AI is a fantastic accessibility tool that has been poisoned in peoples mind by capitalists trying to turn it into a money tree. The technology exists to make this process accessible at both ends, but people won’t.

@neil I am adding alt text but want to add context to why some may not. I post photos because that is the form of communication that works for me. Words are hard. They are stressful to put together. Adding words create a barrier for me when posting. Reading critical posts about people not adding alt text feels like bullying even though it may be well intentioned.

@neil The problem with this is that is some people use photography as a part of a coping mechanism and sometimes the effort of posting it in the first place is all they can do. Constant harrassment of them causes them to quit posting photos altogether rather than be harassed by those who feel their own disability gives them the right to judge others by their own.

Fortunately there are tools that solve both people's issues such as @altbot by @micr0.

@neil

I'm in favor of good alt-text, but saying "it only takes a few seconds" is dismissively ableist.

I do my best to add good alt-text to my images. I've been known to "steal" images I wanted to boost to add (better) alt-text, but it's not easy for me and can take a long time and a lot of spoons. And I'm not even fighting with an awkward interface.

@neil is "allow community to retroactively suggest and add alt text to images inside original toots after publishing" on the #Mastodon roadmap yet?

@neil if your followers with good eyesight read your alt-texts, because they're way more hilarious than your actual posts - you're doing it right. Or weird? Not wrong, anyway.

@neil "Starting something new can feel overwhelming, but making money online is easier than you think! This guide breaks it down step by step, no prior experience needed. 🚀 40% OFF for the first 10 buyers (Code: Akash40) ⏳ Why not give it a shot? [Check it out now!] Link: https://payhip.com/b/LcjxT"

@neil

I often post screens for a software I'm building and I don't know what alt text I should give. A full transcript of the UI? A small description of the feature I want to highlight?

@neil

I find myself wondering how to describe things in Alt text, especially colour. There will be various visual continuums, so colour (and possibly other attributes that I take for granted) will have different importance, impact, scrutibility for different folks. It's quite tricky, methinks!

@neil One thing I've never really been sure of when writing alt-text is that you're supposed to leave it blank if an image is decorative. But what is a decorative image?
A fancy bullet image acting as a bullet point in a list obviously doesn't need one.
A diagram within text needs to be explained with alt-text.
But what about a teaser image at the head of a blog post - that might not be adding any value to the post itself so in that sense it is "decorative", but it also feels like it's setting up the flavour for a post that only sighted readers will get? I feel like that should have an alt text but the W3C guide says that eye-candy images should be left blank https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decorative/#:~:text=...%0A%3C/p%3E-,Example%204

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@neil doesn't AI obviate this?

@neil I do quite like using @altbot for this now, especially since it moved to a non-Gemini based, locally hosted LLM.