Talon
Darius Kazemi@talon Good idea. I have added this to Hometown as a feature request:
Toggle to filter all media that lacks media descriptions · Issue #1218 · hometown-fork/hometown
Pitch Add a toggle to the Home timeline that filters out posts that have media but lack media descriptions (image descriptions, audio descriptions, etc). Alternately, a toggle in user preferences, ...
Samuel Proulx@darius @talon The one thing that worries me about this: it could end up decreasing alt-text. If my followers post without alt-text, and I just filter those posts out, I never ask them to include it (because I didn't realize I missed posts from them), and they feel like they don't have to include it because they know I'll never encounter the image they didn't describe. So screen reader users just get left out and nobody notices or complains.
@fastfinge @talon good point - I imagine that, like many filters, it's something that an individual would turn off and on based on their energy levels for dealing with the thing they are filtering
@fastfinge @talon both of these are good points. I'm definitely leaning toward putting it in the home timeline instead of user settings for the reasons you mentioned.
@darius @fastfinge to be honest, I didn't expect that post to get as much reach as it did, and I'm also a bit worried that people will start using it as an excuse. But I still want the ability to filter that stuff out. It's happening more and more, and I'd really just not want to see it anymore if I can't get people to describe it.
@fastfinge @darius This is a social problem. Even if you force people to include an image description, they will just put anything at all in that box to satisfy the requirement. I fully agree that we should be vocal about this, but I also just don't always have the energy to do that. Just like how we can filter posts by keywords, I think we should have the option to filter posts by alt text or not. The same argument could hold true to that. Don't want to see X? Just filter it. Does that mean we shouldn't have filters either?
@fastfinge @darius part of the idea of hosting my own social media is that I can set it up the way I want. If I were to reply to every undescribed image I encounter on Fedi I'd do nothing else. That's just not how I want to use the platform all the time.
@fastfinge @darius I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I definitely see your point, and I agree with it to some extent, but I'd rather have a pleasant experience in my timeline when I choose to do so. And this same problem still persists. If you filter keywords, you might accidentally post something from someone that regularly posts about the thing you have filtered.
@fastfinge let's see if I can find some emojis that would work in context of an unreasonable argument. Um... maybe these?
There we go. I win the argument?!
There we go. I win the argument?!
@talon I can't wait until these have cross-instance alt-text. 
Because I have all of the angry and sad pony emotes. 
Because I have all of the angry and sad pony emotes. @fastfinge makes me sad that the GitHub issue has been up for a good 2 or 3 years without even a comment from a developer.
@talon Also, like, "Twilight Sparkle's angry face" means something to me. But if you're on another instance, do you need to know that Twilight Sparkle is an animated My Little Pony? That can be assumed knowledge here. But not elsewhere. So...it's one of those problems that is more complex than it first seems.
@fastfinge I think it's another context thing. In normal conversation where emoji would be used, not knowing who twilight sparkle was might not be as important. once it was, I could look it up. But yeah, this is more of an art than a science.
@talon Yup. Though honestly The My Little Pony fanbase has a reputation. Just using pony emoji is a flex in and of itself. It tends to change conversations when used with people on other instances. So you could argue that in this case it's something you need to know to have the same reaction to it that a sighted viewer would. Whereas something like just dragon themed emoji is maybe less important? So yeah. It depends.
@fastfinge even as a sighted person you would need to know *who* they were. Someone that might not be familiar might just see an animated pony, so they too would be missing context information.
@talon "Animated pony" kind of is context. At least, that you may be heading in directions either silly, animated, or furry. But we wouldn't bother mentioning that on our instance's alt text. Everyone knows who Twilight is, what her colouring is, what she looks like, and so-on. So it'd be easy to write alt-text that's fine for me and useless for anyone off-instance.
@fastfinge I suppose that would need to be figured out as we went. But any description at all would still be better than the nothing we have now.
@talon Completely agreed. I just overthink things, because sometimes I feel like, if we can get developer attention, we'd better have them do it right the first time, because we'll never get their attention ever again. So if we wanted "local alt-text" and "federated alt-text" we'd better ask for it up front. Yeah, this is just paranoia I know. But sometimes it feels like you have to live with half-baked a11y.
@fastfinge I think @darius would be much more receptive to accepting pull requests than the official Mastodon repo, and overall I'd say that these kinds of things are much more likely to receive the attention it deserves on Hometown. Both a blessing and a curse, since vanilla Mastodon is a lot more popular, but it also means we can actually figure this out properly and then still decide to push it upstream. So maybe we could just open an issue about emoji descriptions and see if we can make it work somehow. There wasn't even a discussion at all about it over on Mastodon's side and I'm sure here we would at least be heard.