@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