@Richard Lewis You can really put a whole lot of effort into finding the optimal description for each one of your images. You can sit down and educate yourself by reading through dozens upon dozens of webpages and articles and blog posts about alt-texts and image descriptions. You can spend hours or days or more searching for and reading Mastodon posts, about alt-texts and image descriptions from a Mastodon point of view until you hope you're well-educated enough to know how to optimise your image descriptions for the Fediverse.

You can rack your brains about

• what's important in your image in the context of your post and what isn't
• who will or may be in the audience of your post
• what they know about your post/your images and what they don't
• what they may want to know about your post/your images, regardless of whether that's important in the context or not
• whether they're willing to go find the missing information themselves
• whether they could find the missing information themselves if they tried in the first place, or whether they'd have to depend on asking you
• whether having to ask or search for missing information is okay in the culture of your audience, or whether you're required to supply all that information right away

and optimise each one of your image descriptions according to your findings. You don't want to throw anyone in front of a bus by neglect, now, do you? And you don't want to appear like a lazy bum, right?

You can educate yourself about many rules of describing images. Like, how to properly describe colours. Or to always put explanations into the post text body and never into the alt-text. Or when and why an additional image description in the post text body makes sense. You can abide by them all.

You can hone your skills and fine-tune your image descriptions at least to near-perfection. You can spend hours or days describing one image, composing and writing it completely by hand with absolutely zero AI support.

Nobody will honour it. It feels like nobody really appreciates your effort if nobody even likes/faves your image posts.

I've done all of the above. All the way to describing each image twice over. Not often because it takes me very long to describe one measly image. I haven't posted a single fully original image since mid-2024. But whenever I do, practically nobody cares.

Granted, it doesn't help that the two channels on which I post my images nowadays (if at all), @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet and @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams), barely have any reach. And even if they had, most Mastodon users would be scared away by the summary/CW announcing a post that exceeds 500 characters by huge magnitudes. But my original image posts can't do without a long image description in the post text body, and even my meme posts can't do without an appropriate amount of explanations, so they have to be that long. And it feels like I've just wasted the hours or days that I've invested into researching for and writing image descriptions.

If anything at all, someone from the alt-text police will show up and attack you and call you ableist for not describing your images exactly by their personal standards. In fact, you can be called ableist by talking about image descriptions instead of just simply delivering perfect image descriptions right off the bat. By whichever definition of "perfect". But don't you dare deviate from it even only a smidge, for that'd be ableist.

Although, seriously, people getting together and talking about image descriptions and alt-texts and finding a consensus and common definitions for good alt-texts and image descriptions for the whole Fediverse is what we so direly need. But not even the alt-text police coordinate their image description quality standards, nor do they communicate them. You have to know them just like so.

What makes matters worse is that if your alt-text exceeds 512 characters, Misskey will discard it entirely, and accessibility activists on Misskey will think you're too lazy to write an alt-text. This may apply to the various Forkeys as well.

You can't possibly write perfect image descriptions for everyone. But you have to write perfect image descriptions for everyone because everyone demands you write perfect image descriptions for them personally. Or else!

CC: @Nervensäge 💐 @jeSuisatire  neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #A11y #Accessibility #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta