Image descriptions are important in the Fediverse, at least if your posts have a chance to reach Mastodon. But is it only about having image descriptions in general? Is it only about having image descriptions at all? Or is it about image description quality as well?

Blind or visually-impaired users say that anything is better than nothing. But seriously, the image file name as the alt-text is useless. So is a copy of the post text as the alt-text; at least one mobile app for Mastodon seems to do that automatically. So is some gibberish written into the alt-text, just so that there's some alt-text.

So you write a short image description for your alt-text. That should be much better than nothing.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description lacks detail.

Since you can't or don't want to write a longer description, you leave that to an AI.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description is obvious AI slop. The AI is inaccurate, it hallucinates, it misidentifies things and it still leaves out details.

Okay, so you sit down and put quite some time and effort into a hand-written image description that's both accurate and detailed. At least you think so.

And still, someone may come and criticise and/or sanction you for having left out certain details.

If you don't fix your image description to their satisfaction, you're insulted as ableist and blocked very publicly so that as many other users as possible block you, too.

Now, minimum quality standards for image descriptions are evolving over time. What matters now didn't necessarily matter two years ago. Things that don't matter now may matter in two years or in five years. Even today, alt-text activists criticise image posts that are several years old for image descriptions that they consider less than optimal. This means the image descriptions that you write today must be good enough for as long as your image posts stay available. If they aren't, have fun going through all your old image posts, editing them and upgrading the image descriptions to the latest minimum requirements.

There's only way to be safe from Mastodon's alt-text police in the long run: First of all, you must educate yourself about all the rules and guidelines of alt-texts and image descriptions, and there are dozens of websites about these. You can't know beforehand which ones of these rules will be declared mandatory by someone from the alt-text police in the future, so you'd better follow them to a tee already now. Of course, when two rules contradict each other, you must know which one to follow.

Also, you must know that the requirements and quality standards for good alt-texts and image descriptions on Mastodon are different from the entire rest of the Web. What's good enough for the Web isn't necessarily good enough for Mastodon.

Lastly, you must know your audience. And normally, your audience can be anyone anywhere in the Fediverse or even on the Web. There are only very few places in the Fediverse where you can control who will be able to read your stuff, and Mastodon isn't one of them. You must know your audience, and you must at least be able to estimate what they know about the contents of your image, what they don't know and what they need to know. If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something is, explain it, but please do so in the post text and not in the alt-text! If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something looks like, but it may want to know, describe what it looks like.

As for my own images, my strategy is to write two image descriptions for each image. One is the short image description; it goes into the alt-text. I'm going to limit that to a maximum of 512 characters because Misskey and its forks delete alt-texts that are over 512 characters long. The other one is the long image description; it goes into the post text. The long image description is fully detailed, it contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its descriptions, and it contains transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable in the image or not.

Posting memes is a bit easier. There is only one image description that's hopefully short enough to go into the alt-text. But I still need to explain a whole lot of things, and as I can't always rely upon links to websites like KnowYourMeme for explanations, I often have to write a whole lot of explanations into the post.

Ideally, the worst that could happen to me is being criticised for my alt-text exceeding 200 characters or my post exceeding 500 characters or being blocked for the latter. I reduce the chance for that to happen with a summary that includes a long post content warning with the rough length of the post and the hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost that can be filtered. I almost always add hashtags for folks to filter.

But I hope that nobody can say I haven't tried hard enough.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

Image descriptions are important in the Fediverse, at least if your posts have a chance to reach Mastodon. But is it only about having image descriptions in general? Is it only about having image descriptions at all? Or is it about image description quality as well?

Blind or visually-impaired users say that anything is better than nothing. But seriously, the image file name as the alt-text is useless. So is a copy of the post text as the alt-text; at least one mobile app for Mastodon seems to do that automatically. So is some gibberish written into the alt-text, just so that there's some alt-text.

So you write a short image description for your alt-text. That should be much better than nothing.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description lacks detail.

Since you can't or don't want to write a longer description, you leave that to an AI.

But then you're criticised and sanctioned because your image description is obvious AI slop. The AI is inaccurate, it hallucinates, it misidentifies things and it still leaves out details.

Okay, so you sit down and put quite some time and effort into a hand-written image description that's both accurate and detailed. At least you think so.

And still, someone may come and criticise and/or sanction you for having left out certain details.

If you don't fix your image description to their satisfaction, you're insulted as ableist and blocked very publicly so that as many other users as possible block you, too.

Now, minimum quality standards for image descriptions are evolving over time. What matters now didn't necessarily matter two years ago. Things that don't matter now may matter in two years or in five years. Even today, alt-text activists criticise image posts that are several years old for image descriptions that they consider less than optimal. This means the image descriptions that you write today must be good enough for as long as your image posts stay available. If they aren't, have fun going through all your old image posts, editing them and upgrading the image descriptions to the latest minimum requirements.

There's only way to be safe from Mastodon's alt-text police in the long run: First of all, you must educate yourself about all the rules and guidelines of alt-texts and image descriptions, and there are dozens of websites about these. You can't know beforehand which ones of these rules will be declared mandatory by someone from the alt-text police in the future, so you'd better follow them to a tee already now. Of course, when two rules contradict each other, you must know which one to follow.

Also, you must know that the requirements and quality standards for good alt-texts and image descriptions on Mastodon are different from the entire rest of the Web. What's good enough for the Web isn't necessarily good enough for Mastodon.

Lastly, you must know your audience. And normally, your audience can be anyone anywhere in the Fediverse or even on the Web. There are only very few places in the Fediverse where you can control who will be able to read your stuff, and Mastodon isn't one of them. You must know your audience, and you must at least be able to estimate what they know about the contents of your image, what they don't know and what they need to know. If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something is, explain it, but please do so in the post text and not in the alt-text! If your audience doesn't necessarily know what something looks like, but it may want to know, describe what it looks like.

As for my own images, my strategy is to write two image descriptions for each image. One is the short image description; it goes into the alt-text. I'm going to limit that to a maximum of 512 characters because Misskey and its forks delete alt-texts that are over 512 characters long. The other one is the long image description; it goes into the post text. The long image description is fully detailed, it contains all explanations necessary to understand the image and its descriptions, and it contains transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable in the image or not.

Posting memes is a bit easier. There is only one image description that's hopefully short enough to go into the alt-text. But I still need to explain a whole lot of things, and as I can't always rely upon links to websites like KnowYourMeme for explanations, I often have to write a whole lot of explanations into the post.

Ideally, the worst that could happen to me is being criticised for my alt-text exceeding 200 characters or my post exceeding 500 characters or being blocked for the latter. I reduce the chance for that to happen with a summary that includes a long post content warning with the rough length of the post and the hashtags #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost that can be filtered. I almost always add hashtags for folks to filter.

But I hope that nobody can say I haven't tried hard enough.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

When you see it, you'll shit brix: The Hubzilla timeline.

The "it" that you're supposed to see is:

• The Fediverse did, in fact, not start with Mastodon.
  There was something in the Fediverse before Mastodon: Mistpark was there almost 6 years before Mastodon, Hubzilla was there 10 months before Mastodon.
  Mastodon came into an already existing Fediverse with servers and users and content and a culture.
  The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. And it will never be.
• The Fediverse had quote-posts almost 6 years before Mastodon.
  (Accurate implication: The non-Mastodon Fediverse can quote-post any public Mastodon toot with no problems, and it has always been able to do so, for as long as Mastodon has been around.)
• The Fediverse had groups almost 6 years before Mastodon which still doesn't even support groups.
• The Fediverse had better lists than Mastodon lists almost 6 years before Mastodon.
• The Fediverse had reply control almost 6 years before Mastodon where people are still waiting for some kind of reply control.
• The Fediverse had permissions almost 6 years before Mastodon where the concept of permissions is completely unknown.

And if you've really paid attention:

• The Fediverse had no character limit to worry about almost 6 years before Mastodon came along with only 500 characters.
  The Fediverse had 16,777,215 characters almost 6 years before Mastodon had 500 characters.
• The Fediverse had full rich-text formatting almost 6 years before Mastodon.
  The Fediverse could generate bold type, italics, underline, code blocks, bullet-point lists etc. without any Unicode trickery. Almost 6 years before Mastodon was there. And more than 12 years before Mastodon could even only display that stuff.

Although it should be blatantly obvious: This here is not a Mastodon toot. This post comes from Hubzilla directly to your Mastodon apps.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mistpark #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseCulture #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #Lists #ReplyControl #Permissions #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #TextFormatting #RichText #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse

When you see it, you'll shit brix: The Hubzilla timeline.

The "it" that you're supposed to see is:

• The Fediverse did, in fact, not start with Mastodon.
  There was something in the Fediverse before Mastodon: Mistpark was there almost 6 years before Mastodon, Hubzilla was there 10 months before Mastodon.
  Mastodon came into an already existing Fediverse with servers and users and content and a culture.
  The Fediverse has never been only Mastodon. And it will never be.
• The Fediverse had quote-posts almost 6 years before Mastodon.
  (Accurate implication: The non-Mastodon Fediverse can quote-post any public Mastodon toot with no problems, and it has always been able to do so, for as long as Mastodon has been around.)
• The Fediverse had groups almost 6 years before Mastodon which still doesn't even support groups.
• The Fediverse had better lists than Mastodon lists almost 6 years before Mastodon.
• The Fediverse had reply control almost 6 years before Mastodon where people are still waiting for some kind of reply control.
• The Fediverse had permissions almost 6 years before Mastodon where the concept of permissions is completely unknown.

And if you've really paid attention:

• The Fediverse had no character limit to worry about almost 6 years before Mastodon came along with only 500 characters.
  The Fediverse had 16,777,215 characters almost 6 years before Mastodon had 500 characters.
• The Fediverse had full rich-text formatting almost 6 years before Mastodon.
  The Fediverse could generate bold type, italics, underline, code blocks, bullet-point lists etc. without any Unicode trickery. Almost 6 years before Mastodon was there. And more than 12 years before Mastodon could even only display that stuff.

Although it should be blatantly obvious: This here is not a Mastodon toot. This post comes from Hubzilla directly to your Mastodon apps.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mistpark #Friendica #Hubzilla #FediverseCulture #QuotePost #QuotePosts #QuoteTweet #QuoteTweets #QuoteToot #QuoteToots #QuoteBoost #QuoteBoosts #QuotedShares #Groups #FediGroups #FediverseGroups #Lists #ReplyControl #Permissions #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #TextFormatting #RichText #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse