@Megan Lynch (she/her) @Max Leibman It all depends on how you describe your images and how many. For example, there's a huge difference between occasionally posting one picture and churning out dozens of picture posts at a time, one every few minutes.

Also, if you only do the bare minimum in not even 150 characters, it may be fairly easy.

Poetic or whimsical image descriptions could be fun. I don't know, I don't do that.

But it's a wholly different story if you really want to go by the book. If you've studied alt-text and image description guidelines such as the Cooper Hewitt Guidelines for Image Description and the many posts on alt-texts and image descriptions by Veronica With Four Eyes, and your goal is to fulfill them all to a tee. If you're shooting for perfection in accessibility. If, for example, you take care of details such as not using line breaks or the quotation marks on your keyboard in alt-text. If you actually worry about whether or not to mention the races and genders of people in your images. If, whenever you mention a detail in one of your images, you wonder if you can really assume that everyone knows what it looks like anyway, and whether or not you should better describe what it looks like.

Then it becomes work.

It becomes even more work if your images don't fall into any of the categories that those had in mind who wrote all those image description guidelines, and the context of your images doesn't either. For that doesn't give you a justification to wing it. Instead, you somehow have to apply the existing rules and guidelines plus what blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users say they need to your niche content.

"Write alt-texts for your images," they say. "It's fun, and it only takes a few seconds," they say. In the meantime, it takes me hours to describe one deliberately simple image and days, morning to evening, to describe a more complex one with more surrounding. The results are the longest and most detailed image descriptions in the Fediverse by far. And yet, within a few months, I'll declare them obsolete because I've learned something new again that I haven't applied to them, for example, how to describe colours or dimensions correctly. Not to mention that I constantly have to cope with not being able to make my image posts perfectly accessible to absolutely everyone: I can't describe and explain my images at the level of detail that some people may need, seeing as how obscure the general topic of my images is, while at the same time keeping the descriptions as short as others need them.

You can't say that this is not work.

CC: @Different Than @billy joe bowers-🇺🇦

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@Michael Hanscom Out of curiosity, and to be on the safe side and improve my own image descriptions further: What makes alt-text bad in your opinion? Only when it's rubbish that doesn't have anything to do with the image?

Or is it bad when it isn't accurate enough? When it isn't detailed enough/when certain details that you think should be described are missing? When it's too detailed? When it describes the wrong details?

Is it bad when elements in the image are described the wrong way? When (for any definition of person) a person's skin colour is mentioned rather their race or vice versa, whichever you think is correct? When a person's gender is mentioned although whoever described the image can't know it with absolute certainty? When a shade of a colour is mentioned by name rather than being described?

Is it bad when it doesn't explain what you don't understand in such a way that you understand the image without having to look anything up yourself? Or is it bad when it does explain the image because explanations do not belong into the alt-text (I'm being serious, they actually don't)?

Is it bad when, while getting everything else right, it doesn't contain verbatim transcripts of any and all text in the image? What if there are transcripts in the post text body instead? Is it bad when text is transcribed which you think should not be transcribed, whichever that may be? Is it bad when text in a foreign language is transcribed verbatim in that language and then translated as literally as possible instead of translating it right away?

Or do you have other criteria that I don't know about and I haven't thought of yet?

When is alt-text so bad that it justifies both mocking and writing a replacement?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@Justin Derrick The question, however, is: What is "high-quality"? How is it defined?

Would the bot go by the definition valid for commercial/scientific/technological websites and blogs, i.e. ideally no more than 125 characters, and only a short and concise visual description with no further information?

Or would the bot go by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's standards, i.e. the longer and more detailed, the better, any and all extra information is welcome in alt-text (because it doesn't fit into the toot), and the limit is 1,500 characters?

That is, if it were for me, the bot would go look both for alt-texts and for image descriptions in the post text body and judge both. Because I do both at the same time for my original images. An extremely detailed long image description in the post itself (character limit for post and alt-texts combined here: over 16 million) that also comes with all necessary explanations and transcripts of all text in the image, plus an alt-text that's as detailed as 1,500 characters (minus notification about the long description in the post) allow, but with no explanations, and I usually have to leave out text transcripts as well because they're too many.

You may say the alt-text is superfluous if it's just a much shorter version of the long description. But as long as the Mastodon HOA demands there be an alt-text to every image, no matter what (especially seeing as I always hide my image posts behind summaries/content warnings, so you can't see right of the bat that there's a long image description in the post), I add alt-texts to my original images.

I'm actually curious about how the bot would judge my descriptions. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it notices that the bits of text in the image are not transcribed in the alt-text. Maybe it'd be irritated because I have headlines in my long image descriptions, because they're so long that they need two levels of headlines. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it goes strictly by WCAG, and a) the alt-texts exceed 200 characters, b) long image descriptions do not belong into the text body by any known official accessibility standards, and c) neither my alt-texts nor my long descriptions are limited to what's supposed to be important within the context of the post.

Anyway, in the meantime, you can follow the account @Alt Text Hall of Fame and the hashtag #AltTextHallOfFame.

CC: @Simon Brooke

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #MastodonHOA #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@Georgiana Brummell Well, when I describe my images, I have to assume four things.

One, nobody in the Fediverse is even remotely familiar with anything in my images. So what I can't assume is that anyone knows anything about my images anyway, and that it needs no description.

Two, someone somewhere out there might stumble upon my virtual world image posts and end up totally excited because they're proof that the so-called metaverse is, in fact, not dead. And as excited they are, they're also curious about these virtual worlds. Even if they're blind. This means that even if my images focus on something specific, they're just as curious about the whole surroundings.

Three, blind and visually-impaired people want to have the exact same chances at experiencing images as fully sighted people. Now, when someone fully sighted stumbles upon one of my virtual world images for the first time, do you really think they only look at what I say is important in the image? Of course not. Instead, they go on a discovery journey through a whole new and completely unknown universe. They take in all the big and small details in the image, whether these details matter in the context of the post or not.

Well, and I have to assume that blind or visually-impaired people want to have a chance to do the exact same thing. But in order for them to be able to do that, I have to help them by describing all the big and small things.

Four, when I mention something in my images, and someone doesn't know what it looks like, and they can't see it, they want to know what it looks like. Not describing them would be lazy, selfish and ableist. And having blind or visually-impaired users ask me about details is just as ableist. They don't want to have to ask. They want to be told right away. I mean, otherwise I wouldn't have to describe my images at all. If someone wants to know what they show, they can ask, right?

And so I have to describe my images at an extremely high level of detail.

In addition, I have to explain my images so that people understand the image description. I'm currently working on a series of virtual fashion portraits, so-to-speak, so they need tremendously detailed descriptions of the avatar. But nobody will understand the descriptions if I don't explain everything from the ground up.

So right now, the long image description starts with some 12,000 characters of explanations in the preamble before any visuals are described. It'd be even more if I had to explain the location where I've taken the images. But I hope I can safely assume that nobody wants to know where the images were taken if the entire background is a neutral, featureless white.

I guess things would be much easier if discussion groups had always been an integral part of the whole Fediverse, including Mastodon, and not just a fringe phenomenon that nobody knows about.

There could be a group about accessibility in the Fediverse, populated by online accessibility experts, by actually blind or visually-impaired people, by people who are both like Veronica with Four Eyes and by Fediverse users who want to get their image descriptions as right as possible. They could all discuss things not only with the thread starters, but with one another.

I could go there and ask the questions I have, and I actually have many questions. And people wouldn't just answer me independently from one another. They would see everyone else's answers and comment on these. They would start discussing the topics amongst one another from different points of view to find the best solution, the best answer.

But I can't do that because there are no such discussion groups, and everyone is in places that neither have nor support groups in the first place.

The best I can do is ask a question and then mass-mention not only Guppe groups on accessibility, but also a bunch of Fediverse users of whom I know that they are blind or visually-impaired. Unfortunately, Veronica with Four Eyes, a proponent of describing all images twice like I do, is not even active in the Fediverse, if she's there at all.

I've done that last year when I needed to know if I have to describe what the herringbone fabric pattern looks like or what a full brogue shoe looks like in general and what a specific full brogue shoe looks like in particular, or whether I can assume that to be known. I think I got three independent replies although, fortunately, everyone mentioned each other. They said that I don't have to describe them, and one or two said that I can safely assume that people know what I mean if I just drop the names.

Right now I'm wondering if I can safely assume that everyone knows what the three lions in the Royal Arms of England look like, or whether they need their own detail description. I have to deal with a number of sports jackets with the three lions on the buttons, that's why. And in fact, the buttons are so small in the images that even sighted people can't see the three lions on them.

Also, I'm wondering if everyone is familiar with the term "shank button", or whether that requires an explanation, too.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta

@TheZeldaZone👑🏳️‍⚧️🎮🎀 On the one hand, that's the very reason why I give so many and so detailed explanations in the long image descriptions that I put directly into my posts in addition to alt-texts. (I can do that because my character limit is not 500 but 16,777,215.) My original images show extremely obscure niche content, and they aren't even real-life photos. That's why they need very extensive descriptions and explanations.

On the other hand, additional information must never be available exclusively in the alt-text. Not everyone can access alt-text. Reading alt-text requires working hands. Not everyone has working hands. Those who don't cannot read alt-text. Any and all information that's available only in the alt-text and neither in the post nor in the image is inaccessible and therefore permanently lost to these people.

If accessibility is for everyone, it must also be for those with physical disabilities that prevent them from reading alt-text.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@Frost 🐺❄️:therian: I didn't add tags to your post. If I were on Friendica, I could do that. But I'm not. I added them to my own comment.

And I've added those specific tags mostly for other people to be able to filter away my posts or comments or at least have them hidden behind automatically generated reader-side content warnings. That's a feature that has been available in the Fediverse since 2010 and on Mastodon since 2022. Hubzilla, where I am, has had it since its inception which was before Mastodon was created. I'm living Hubzilla's culture here.

I always tag anything I post that exceeds 500 characters even only by a smidge #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost so that those who don't want to see my "long" posts or comments have a choice not to see them. And trust me, there are lots of people on Mastodon who want the whole Fediverse to be a purist micro-blogging platform, and who want to rid themselves of any and all content that exceeds 500 characters. I give them a chance to do so.

When I talk about image descriptions in general, I always use the tags #ImageDescription, #ImageDescriptions, #ImageDescriptionMeta and #CWImageDescriptionMeta, and when I talk about alt-text in particular, I always use the tags #AltText, #AltTextMeta and #CWAltTextMeta.

For one, #AltText, #ImageDescription and #ImageDescriptions help people find my posts and comments on the topic. If you really think that the majority of Mastodon users will take a look at the whole thread and therefore your post, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Besides, #AltTextMeta, #CWAltTextMeta, #ImageDescriptionMeta and #CWImageDescriptionMeta make it possible for them to remove my "weird" and "crude" ideas on alt-text and image descriptions which are "weird" and "crude" because they deviate from Mastodon's "standards" so much that they may be potentially disturbing.

By using these hashtags, I hurt you.

By not using these hashtags, I probably hurt hundreds or thousands of Fediverse users who have filters for one or several of these hashtags to get rid of my posts and comments. Not using these hashtags does more damage overall than using them.

If you aren't okay with that, go block me on the spot.

@Frost 🐺❄️:therian: Image descriptions are cool and good! Please write them, if you can! Not just for blind people; they're also super helpful for if the image doesn't load (we personally have this when we're out of mobile data and limited to nigh-unusably-slow internet) and for people staring at the image going "...what am I supposed to be looking at here, what's important in this?" (also me).
How about people who don't even know what it is that they're looking at? Especially if they're curious about what it is?

I'm asking because my original images aren't even real-life photos. Rather, they are from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds, very obscure as in only one out of at least 200,000 Fediverse users even knows the underlying technology, much less specific places there. If I posted my images without sufficient explanation and description, next to nobody would have an idea what the images show.

Don't stress about having a Bad Description, and don't stress about Describing Literally Everything – less is actually /better./ Something simple like "my kitty in a basket, looking cute" is a perfect description, and way better than describing every last irrelevant detail. The irrelevant details actually make it harder to read.
Is there any hard, steadfast rule on what's relevant, and what isn't? One that applies to all images out there, no matter how obscure and niche and unusual the content?

Again, I post super-obscure content. Ask random people out of the blue what it looks like, and they won't know, regardless of whether they're sighted or not. They simply don't even know that it exists.

You can assume that everyone knows what a real-life cat looks like.

But, for example, I can't assume that everyone knows what my avatar looks like, also, but not only because my avatar can wear a whole assortment of different outfits.

At the same time, I can't assume that nobody wants to know what my avatar looks like. Or anything else in-world. Thus, I owe them a visual description. A sufficiently detailed one.

In fact, I can't just simply mention there being things in my images. I always have to expect there being blind or visually-impaired people asking, "Yeah, that's all fine, but what does it look like?" They legitimately don't know. I mean, how should they? In addition, they may ask, "And why do I even have to ask? Why don't you tell me right away what it looks like, you ableist swine?"

Trees are simple to describe. Buildings are a nightmare. And it gets even worse with objects that don't exist in real life. I couldn't possibly get away with mentioning that there's an OSW beacon standing somewhere. Would you know what it looks like? Especially since there appear to be at least five standard types of beacon, not mentioning modified beacons or even custom builds?

In fact, would you know what it is in the first place? What it does? What it's there for? What do you think, how many people would know? How many people would be completely satisfied if I only name-dropped it?

In fact, the same goes for the very location. Most people won't have the slightest idea what that place is of which they see a part in my pictures. But they may want to know. But if I just name-dropped Sulphur or BlackWhite Castle or UniCampus or Tropicana Tuneage or the OSgrid birthday sims, people would be about as smart as before because next to nobody has ever heard of any of these places before. (Be honest, have you?) And so I have to explain what they are and where they are.

For almost two years now, I've had to describe my original images twice. First of all, there's a long, detailed description in the post text body itself (as opposed to the alt-text); I've got a character limit of over 16.7 million (!), so I've got enough space. That description also includes all explanations necessary to understand the image and its content as well as verbatim transcripts of all pieces of text within the borders of the image. It regularly reaches five-digit character counts, and it may take me multiple entire days to research for and write it.

There is a whole lot of reasons why this description has to be so long.

In addition, I always distill a shorter description with no explanations for the alt-text from the long description. It usually doesn't contain any text transcripts either because there simply is no room for them. Nonetheless, it normally grows about 900 characters long. I need the other 600 characters to announce the long descriptions in the post itself so that people on Mastodon prior to 4.3 find them.


In case you say that this is way overkill: Before I've (content warning: long post, eye contact, alcohol) started writing highly detailed image descriptions, my virtual world image posts looked like (content warning: eye contact, alcohol) this or (content warning: long post, eye contact, alcohol) this or (content warning: eye contact) this. Apart from the missing full stops (and the missing content warnings), would you honestly and sincerely say the descriptions in the alt-texts are fully sufficient for everyone out there? Or would you say that even they are still too long?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta

@-0--1- @David G. Smith If anything, the AI to describe the image should be chooseable, and the available AIs should be configurable at least for the admin. And especially, AI image description must not be mandatory and hard-coded. There must always be a way to describe an image manually, no matter how many people swear that AI is better at describing any image out there than any human.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI

@-0--1- @David G. Smith Still, first of all, if I posted an image without an alt-text (which I'd never do), AltBot would have to assume full admin rights over the Hubzilla channel that I'm currently commenting from because that's the only way for another Fediverse actor to alter the source code of my posts.

Altering the source code of the post is necessary because Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte neither have a dedicated alt-text field, nor are images file attachments there. Rather, images are embedded directly into the post, in-line, just the same way blogs handle images. And alt-text has to be woven into the image-embedding code in the post. Thus, the post itself has to be altered.

So, assuming AltBot actually manages to circumvent the two most advanced permissions systems in the Fediverse, it would have to trace back an image that it perceives as a file attachment to where exactly the embedding code for that particular image is in the post.

It would have to be able to both understand and write the specific flavour of BBcode used by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

It would have to, for example, take this piece of code...
[zrl=https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295][zmg=800x533]https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photo/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295-2.jpg[/zmg][/zrl]...and edit it into this.
[zrl=https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295][zmg=https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photo/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295-2.jpg]Digital shaded rendering of the main building of the Universal Campus, a downloadable island location for 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. The camera position is about three metres or ten feet above the ground. The camera is tilted slightly upward and rotated slightly to the left from the building's longitudinal axis. The futuristic building is over 200 metres long, stretching far into the distance, and its front is about 50 metres wide. Its structure is mostly textured to resemble brushed stainless steel, and almost everything in-between is grey tinted glass. The main entrance of the building in the middle of the front has two pairs of glass doors. They are surrounded by a massive complex geometrical structure, very roughly reminiscent of a vintage video game spacecraft with the front facing upward. Four huge cylindrical pillars carry the roof end, the outer two of which extend beyond it. All are tilted away from the landing area in front of the building and at the same time outward to the sides. The sides of the building are slightly tilted themselves. In the distance, a large geodesic dome rises from the building. There is a large circular area in front of the main entrance as well as several wide paths. They have light concrete textures, and they are lined with low walls with almost white concrete textures. Furthermore, various shrubs and trees decorate the scenery.[/zmg][/zrl]
Not to mention that AltBot would require extensive detail niche knowledge about the topic covered by the image to be able to whip up the above alt-text in the first place. (By the way: The alt-text example is genuine. I've actually used it. And it's an extremely whittled-down version of the long image description of the same image in the post itself, a description which has to be the longest in the entire Fediverse.)

Ideally, AltBot would do so without flagging the post as edited.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta