I understand that putting alternative text on your images is something that is not done on other networks and it can be difficult to develop the mechanics of doing it and that more than one person will forget and publish more than one image without a d...

[anpuankhses@meow.social]

I understand that putting alternative text on your images is something that is not done on other networks and it can be difficult to develop the mechanics of doing it and that more than one person will forget and publish more than one image without a description. :blobfox3c:

But don't you feel that when you see big artists not doing it, it doesn't feel like a mistake but rather pure audacity and apathy? As if they assume that they are already so big and well-known that they don't need to abide by social norms to have an audience. :blobfoxupset:

Or is it just me, that I'm too suspicious? :blobfoxlaughsweat:

[owashe@meow.social]

@Anpuankhses I think it's because it's because other places aren't /nearly/ as concerned with accessibility. I wouldn't say it's out of malice but definitely out of a "I really can't be bothered"

One thing I do not understand are artists who were very good about alt-text, decided to try a different social media, and whenever they decide to post here they forget alt-text.

Why? I /know/ they can do it, why did they /stop?/ :neodog_glare:

[anpuankhses@meow.social]

@owashe I personally didn't know anything about alt text until I started here on Mastodon. In fact, I have no idea how it's done on other networks. Here, everything is very intuitive. :blobfox_w_:

It is clear that this network is looking for a more personal interaction and not the massive accumulation of likes and content at full blast. :blobfoxwhoaa:

[owashe@meow.social]

@Anpuankhses I think BlueSky has some sort of alt-text thing (which makes the ones that come back from /there/ even more baffling) and Twitter is just... ick.

But yeah, that's one thing I like about this place, it's not algorithmically driven so there's more of an effort to treat others as living creatures instead of just stat numbers x3

[anpuankhses@meow.social]

@owashe It's super comforting to be in a place that encourages you to take your time to calmly do things well and doesn't require you to produce and produce tirelessly, eh? :blobfox_w_:

[riley@toot.cat]

@Anpuankhses There's forms of art where trying to write about the picture would be like dancing about architecture: you just can't convey substantially what the original artpiece conveyed. Sometimes, it can make sense to write a new artpiece, or to explore a different facet on what's on the picture using the medium of writing, as xkcd does, but I'm inclined to argue that it's not always the case.

One day, we'll have well-established etiquette about dealing with such. Right now, it's not yet established, and leaving the alt-text unspecified may be a more sensible option than going for some formulaic "This alt-text intentionally left blank", whose subtle explicitness a reasonable viewer could easily take the wrong way. Especially considering that an artist who's spent a lot of practice points in becoming an expert in graphic arts may be clumsy, or not feel confident, expressing themselves in words. Graphic arts are, after all, more cross-cultural than textual ones.

In summary, I'm in favour of socially nudging people to use alt-texts as a general guideline, but I want to keep open the possibility that only some people not following the guideline are arseholes. Some, even if it's a small fraction, may have reasonable, defensible, excuses.

[riley@toot.cat]

@Anpuankhses Alt-text came to the web very early on, although originally not as much as an accessibility thing but a 'graceful degradation' thing. Remember, early browser had a mode where you could ask images to not be loaded by default. Alt-texts were used as the placeholders. I believe I first read a paper arguing for using them for accessibility enhancement only in 1998 or 1999.

A big reason for their slow adoption in modern social media is not as much people's lack of knowledge about them, but the fact that they don't fit neatly into the paper publication based metaphors that have been common in social media since about 2005 or so. One of the insufficiently cursed legacies of Microsoft's domination of the 1990s' PC scene: subtly convincing "everyone" to think of the web as though it was a piece of paper you were typing on in Word for Windows. The sort of people working on Fediverse have been bolder in trying to work around these metaphorical limitations, for the same reason why the queer furries making Rust have repeatedly boldly gone where no language designer has dared to loiter.

@owashe