Mastodawn

Alt Text Hall of Fame Apr 29, 2024

A few extra seconds of your time it takes to add a good image description can really improve someone's day.

"To a totally blind person like me it means a lot to have a picture in my mind of your images, especially the animal pics."

"I don't know what it is, but as a blind user it's making me emotional to be able to actually interact with content."

https://alttexthalloffame.org

#accessibility #a11y #AltText #ImageDescriptions

Alt Text Hall of Fame

Celebration of the effort, ingenuity, and creativity that goes into making the web a friendlier and more inclusive place, one captioned image at a time.

Alt Text Hall of Fame - Celebrating well-written image descriptions.

Show thread

Kimota94 Apr 30, 2024

@alttexthalloffame My much older brother tells the story, from his childhood in the 1950s, of my mother driving the car through the countryside and narrating what she saw so that her blind (from diabetes) husband could enjoy the view. My brother would lie down on the back seat, close his eyes and see the world the way his father saw it.

I think of that every time there’s a request here to include ALT text descriptions on Mastodon. It’s such a small ask with such a huge upside.

Show thread

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦Apr 30, 2024

PEEPS, no it is not a small ask for a lot of people. it does change the posting flow. IOW it takes time for those adjustments to sink in.

as a writer, i take microblogging seriously. so when this became an issue here, i decided to honor the request.

it doesn't feel natural at all. there are times too much is going on in an image that i feel like am cheating by not including it all.

sometimes i want to get the post out of the way & include the AltTex on edit. 1/2

@Kimota94 @alttexthalloffame

Show thread

Jupiter Rowland Apr 30, 2024

@yes, it's me, liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
as a writer, i take microblogging seriously. so when this became an issue here, i decided to honor the request.

it doesn't feel natural at all. there are times too much is going on in an image that i feel like am cheating by not including it all.
I'm in a similar situation, I think.

If I post images, they're either renderings from 3-D virtual worlds or memes about said 3-D virtual worlds. Either way, they're about a very very obscure niche topic that probably not even one in 10,000 Fediverse users knows something about.

When you describe real-world photographs, you can skip a whole lot of details and explanations because you can safely assume that a) people are generally familiar with them and b) they're so mundane that nobody cares anyway.

When I describe pictures from super-obscure virtual worlds, I can't assume either. Nobody is familiar with anything in them. Besides, 3-D virtual worlds are still a novelty that's likely to catch people's interest to such degrees that they might want to know everything about them. So a whole lot of describing and explaining is necessary.

What @Alt Text Hall of Fame refers to as...
A few extra seconds of your time
...always ends up many hours of research and writing. The three longest times I've taken to describe one particular image were over 13 hours for 40,000 characters, over 13 hours for well over 38,000 characters and over 8 hours for over 25,000 characters, and I still find the last one lacking and the former two outdated by my current standards.

This does not mean that I don't describe my images anymore. But I have to plan image posts days or even weeks in advance, and then I have to find motives that won't take me too long to describe and that I can describe in sufficient detail in the first place.

CC: @Kimota94

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

The upcycling and upgrading of Clutterfly furniture continues

14 more boxes of upgraded Clutterfly items released; CW: long post (almost 49,000 characters due to extremely long image descriptions, but the main post text itself is 770 characters long), eye contact (technically invisible, but present), food (berries and candy canes, technically invisible, but...

Show thread

Alt Text Hall of Fame

@jupiter_rowland @blogdiva Yes, "a few seconds" is a rough estimate that hopefully covers most cases. More detailed images do take more time, for sure!