The amount of hate I've seen directed at alt-text and at people who ask for, and provide, alt-text recently is disgusting.
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Mastodon•ART 🎨 Curatorreplied to Mastodon•ART 🎨 Curator last edited by
- 'doing nothing' is available to you, and you instead choose to attack people who provide this disability aid, or to go out of your way to point out to people that you actively refuse to use this disability aid, you aren't passively opting out of using this disability aid; you are making a deliberate, conscious choice to be an ableist arsehole.
[end of thread]
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Mastodon•ART 🎨 Curatorreplied to Mastodon•ART 🎨 Curator last edited by
(Just a note on the above though, every building should be designed with accessibility in mind, every presentation should be made with accessibility in mind. We should aim for a society where we look after and provide for each other, not where we ostracise and exclude people who have needs different to our own. You know who did that? The actual fascists. Don't be a fascist.)
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Clare Hooleyreplied to Mastodon•ART 🎨 Curator last edited by
@Curator I’m sure someone knows more on this, but I believe having an alt text field that is empty (not with the words ‘blank’) is a valid technique for hiding images from screen readers that are purely decorative so as to prevent word clutter (e.g. a stock image that really would just not add anything to the content by being described). It’s something I can’t do here as I can on my own website but it would be rare I’d want to (my social media images are likely crucial info).
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@Curator The difference alt text makes:
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@clare_hooley @Curator In a web page images are often purely illustrative. You write a blog post and you decorate it with —at best — some nice eye-candy. There’s no point in describing that.
In social media it’s incredibly rare for someone to do that. If you share an image, the image has a point. There are very few times on Mastodon where alt text should be blank.
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@bodhipaksa @Curator yeh, not many, but perhaps not none.
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@clare_hooley @bodhipaksa The solution to this is very easy. Just type something like this to the text field: "Decorative aesthetic image without specific meaning." There, you've described it (in a minimum viable way) and haven't cluttered anyone's perceptions.
Just a little bit more would be better, though. "Aesthetic image of violet tulips just for decoration." If your image doesn't mean much, you can state your intent of putting it there, you meant something when you did!
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@Curator I love the concept of universal access. Like when curb cuts became a thing - wonder of wonders, it also helped folks with baby strollers & shopping carts.
Another advantage of alt text? It gives you more characters to expand context of your post! When I first came to fedi, I used one of the bots that remind you of you post w/o alt text & it helped me develop the habit.
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@Curator somebody else has probably said, but in case they haven’t:
Alt text also helps (some) autistic people and (some) language learners by clarifying ‘obvious’ points of interest, keywords, and sometimes context.
It’s also probably scraped for regurgitative AI because wtf do they use that *isn’t* stolen, but I think the massive help to diverse groups of people is still more impactful.
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@sinituulia @clare_hooley @bodhipaksa funnily enough I was actually told not to do that when learning webdev, if it is not relevant - i was told not to alt it at all. It's all pretty confusing! There are also different notions on how to WRITE alt text on different sites! (Including opinions by people using screen readers). I alt my images, but oh gods, even a well-intentioned person can feel torn apart by contradicting recommendations.
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@weilaverdui @clare_hooley @bodhipaksa I go by the pretty solid guideline of: "If this image didn't load would I be curious to find out what it is?" And most of the time I would be! And often pretty annoyed. What if it's something objectionable to me, and I have no idea? Better that there be SOME indication, even if it's just for decor.
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@sinituulia @weilaverdui @clare_hooley
Also, if there's no alt text at all, some screen readers will read out the file name. Presumably they do this in the hopes that the file name will say something like -cute-kitten.jpg. But on Mastodon uploaded images have file names that are random collections of numbers and letters, like d0a5a09423526786.jpg.
That has to be annoying.
Alt text is fun to write if you imagine you're describing the image to a friend over the phone.
