Was @[email protected] and is also @22, so on the Fediverse since 2017. On semi-permanent hiatus but takes care of @PleaseCaptionBot
Profile photo: Tang?-era statue of a monkey making a fearsome–silly face. Banner image: the fog rolling in between nearby verdant hills and distant mountains on an otherwise perfectly sunny day.
@leberschnitzel let's test! This is a testing post marked as German with the same uncaptioned image as above.
PleaseCaption Bot should reply to this.
Edit: it did. (Makes sense, the bot shouldn't have any filters on language. When it asks to follow someone it asks for all their toots minus their boosts (since it doesn't analyze their boosts, for now).)
@leberschnitzel trying something here: replying to someone I don't follow (you) publicly with an image without alt text in a reply. (Image is an adult capybara labeled "Copybara" followed by two baby capybara labeled "Pastybara".)
PeaseCaption Bot should reply to this.
Edit: it did. Hmmmmm. I am at a loss to explain why it didn't DM you after your post above 🤔
Just a small correction, we had to turn off boost analysis for @PleaseCaptionBot a couple of years ago when Mastodon got editing because edits don't propagate across servers in certain conditions, and it was annoying folks to be told incorrectly that they boosted something without alt text. We have logged a bug report with Mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/28087
(Actually I should check again if this is still broken, maybe it got unexpectedly fixed, in which case I'll turn boost analysis back on again.)
Steps to reproduce the problem This is a new issue being created per @ClearlyClaire's suggestion from #26731 (comment): account 1 on sfba.social (running v4.2.1) posts something account 2 on hachyd...
@villainousfriend @ehyde soooo this is definitely something that technically works today but has poor support.
@WeirdWriter showed us a couple of years ago how they could add alt text on iOS to be embedded in the image and if they texted it to an Android user, they could read it too. Today on iOS the process is really quite simple, you open the photo in Photos app, swipe up, and the first option under the image is “Add a caption”.
But as far as I know, no Mastodon client is smart enough to read this from image EXIF data and pre-populate the alt text field with it 😢 and furthermore, if you upload such an image to any Mastodon server, it will delete the embedded caption for privacy 🙄 there’s an open issue about this for Mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/25985
It could be possible to add support for this to e.g., Phanpy: when you upload a photo, it prepopulates the alt-text with the in-image caption, and when you save an image from Phanpy, it’ll re-embed the alt text? 🤔
Other references: https://octodon.social/@22/110876660994705240
Pitch Mastodon should preserve credit, copyright and licensing info in uploaded images. Removing that data is like stealing, and even FB also preserves that data today. Stripping this data makes me...
@Katiame https://youtu.be/Pg0rtrUOoJY?si=88pTO6Xgomz36dms&t=70 shows you how to add alt text when posting.
To learn how to edit a post you've already made, see https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-edit-posts-in-mastodon/ for a screenshot (basically, you find the three-dots menu under your post, and one of the items in that menu is "Edit"). Editing a toot will send you to the same interface as composing a new toot, so at that point, follow explanation in the video above.
If the video isn't helpful for you, let me know and I'll share a sequence of screenshots.
@FediTips would it make sense to include a link to a video like this, to show visually how to add alt text to the Fedi.tips website?
