George Takei  🏳️‍🌈🖖🏽Jul 14
I haven’t seen it yet. But I’m glad he’s still fighting fascists today!
Show threadDanny Boling ☮️Jul 14

Hey @georgetakei! Some of your followers can't see ANYTHING of your posts because you keep ignoring pleas for #AltText. It's a bad look, George, and makes you look kind of like a dick. Please consider your fans!

#AltText4You
It's white text on the black background of a social media post. It says "If you thought Superman was right for fighting fascists in the 1970s but now you think he's wrong for fighting fascists in the 2020s, then Superman didn't go woke... you went fascist."

Show threadChristian Kent   𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Jul 14

@IAmDannyBoling @georgetakei We need to have a bigger discussion about the emotional labor of this (and the etiquette of demanding it from others in public), only because it is 2025 in an era where automation for this is becoming a realistic expectation

It is time to get sanctimonious — not at all users — but at developers of screen readers (and client software, but those days are also drawing to a close), because #accessibility for all and #AltText for all should be an automatic privilege

This isn’t on the same level as hiding topics behind warning tags.

Show threadDanny Boling ☮️Jul 15

@whophd @georgetakei

I agree to a point but you say "automation for this is becoming a realistic expectation," which is technically correct — but we're not there yet. So for now, ensuring accessibility is still at least partly the responsibility of the user.

Show threadJames Edwards

@IAmDannyBoling @whophd Providing alt text for image posts is *entirely* the responsibility of the post author. I don’t buy these arguments around emotional labour or spoons — if it’s not possible or practical for you to include good alt text, then don’t post the image.

If you want to use automation to create it, that’s up to you, but it’s not reasonable to demand this of screen reader vendors when the cost would be borne by their users.

@georgetakei

Jul 15 at 3:12amWeb
Show threadJupiter RowlandJul 15
@James Edwards This is highly ableist.

This would mean that people who are constantly low on spoons due to Long Covid, Post-Covid, ME/CFS or the like would not be allowed to post images. Ever.

This would mean that autistic people who simply cannot turn images into words (no matter how often your likes tell them to "just try harder", they simply lack the ability) would not be allowed to post images. Ever.

This would mean that blind people would not be allowed to post images. Ever. And yes, they do post images.

CC: @Danny Boling ☮️ @Christian Kent   𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #LongCovid #PostCovid #ME/CFS #Autism #Autistic #Blind #VisuallyImpaired #Disabled #Disability #Ableist #Ableism
Netzgemeinde/Hubzilla

Show threadrobloblawJul 15

@jupiter_rowland
Energy limiting diseases make mental effort difficult for many people. This is a physiological effect (spoons is a shorthand for this). Cognition (like writing a description for s picture) can be surprisingly energetically intensive.

And there are many other neurological condition that make the task difficult or impossible.

Nothing wrong with posting a pic without alt text if you can't do it.

Show threadChristian Kent   𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Jul 17

@siblingpastry CC @jupiter_rowland @IAmDannyBoling

First of all and most of all, James’s point “if you want to use automation to create it, it’s up to you” say what? This should be our entire concerted effort right now.

It should NOT be up to users — it should be (available and) on by default. Or, it should be (free and) available to people who need to read about images they can’t see.

And it needs to be high in the feature development list for the default software — purely so as to make it a minimum requirement for all third party software, at least as far as it’s possible to make “compliance” possible in the Fediverse.

And as for who pays for it — I’ll start, I can donate now — but give us a link! We need to get on this right away.

… The burden of responsibility needs to be correct for:
- one-time efforts
- all-time repeated efforts
- those who aren’t able to see images
- those who aren’t able to write alt-text
- those who aren’t able to pay
- developers juggling infinite priorities
- users who should request this automation
- those in charge of setting higher standards

— —

So second of all, thank you Jupiter for pointing out the stupendous conclusion of James’s demands. Don’t post at all? What kind of exclusionary BS is that? We were even referring explicitly to those without the “spoons” — yep I didn’t realise that’s the stage I got to on some days.

The fact that — while in this exhausted state — we are probably providing training data for an AI to anonymously and thanklessly develop an engine that does exactly what we need (image to text translator) … this is … well, I’m moving on from annoyed, to just insistent that we adopt this technology for everyone’s benefit.

How about this proposal:

Show threadChristian Kent   𝘊𝘒 :＼﹥Jul 17

@siblingpastry @jupiter_rowland @IAmDannyBoling

A proposal for how to delegate the automation of alt-text, outsourcing it away from client software:

1. a flag on by default that is auto-alt-text
2. when images are posted without alt-text, a client checks for this flag and if it is enabled, sends a “translation” request to a third server
3. Mastodon community funds a server to convert (and cache as text) and serve the alt-text, with sanity checks and rate limiting against spam/DOS
4. pressure on Google, OpenAI, etc to produce their own Image2Text servers as a contribution to the Fediverse
5. I2T servers can limit by client and/or posts, as they see fit … clients might receive a “503” (?) error as far as “you’ve had too many thousands of requests for today”, so clients can try another server if they want … round robin?

… but in reality the real processing burden is on the conversion side, seeing which Mastodon servers host legitimate images — and if “posts” and “views” are coming from federated servers who stridently manage their user base, banning the bots — keeping their own traffic at “human” levels, then we don’t have a problem. It probably excludes the monolithic mastodon.social in the first place and gives us another good reason to proliferate & federate

6. we explicitly promote client software to request I2T services on demand, and never preload ahead, like screenfuls of a timeline — the whole thing only gets viable when it serves text at the speed humans can read, after all
7. I2T servers can manually corroborate if they trust each other to share processing burden, and send each other the cached text of already-converted images … we might call it federating 😁

Show threadHugs4friends ♾🇺🇦 🇵🇸😷Jul 15
@siblingpastry Stick it.