A Tumblr post by DracuDyke. I honestly do not know how applicable this is outside of Tumblr, particularly on the Mastodon/Misskey/Pleroma, etc. side of the Fediverse. I do know that most such instances don't provide the requisite character count to pull this off. Heck, I had to break up the screenshot because there wasn't enough room for all of the alt text if I left it intact. (Yes, I know the character count for toots vs alt text are entirely unrelated to each other. There's no way I could make this a single toot on my main account.)
Also, does anyone know what "PT" stands for in this context?
Is only Alt Text enough?
[PT: Is only Alt Text enough? End PT.]
If you post something and include an image description in the alt text, that's great! But it would be even better if you included a description in the body of the post as well. Alt text doesn't always work, especially on a platform as broken as Tumblr is. An image must also load fully before the [ALT] button shows up, so people with Internet issues won't be able to see it for a long time. It also requires pressing on the small [ALT] button, which may be difficult for people with motor issues. The point I'm trying to make here is that the ability to access and read alt text is conditional, not a given. Putting the image description in the text of the post helps it be accessible to everyone.
"Okay, well can I at least put it under a readmore?"
[PT: "Okay, well can I at least put it under a readmore?" End PT]
No! If your blog or the original post is deleted, that readmore is gone forever! It also presents an extra step, another thing to push. This can be difficult for a number of reasons! I have also heard that readmores are difficult for some screenreaders, but I can't remember for sure.
"Can I at least make it pretty?"
[PT: "Can I at least make it pretty?"]
No! If you write the image description in small text, italics, bold, colored text, or other fonts that makes the description harder to read! That defeats the purpose! It can also be hard for screenreaders to read certain kinds of text, especially unicode or other fonts.
TLDR: Please include your image descriptions in the body of the post as plain text. It's the best way to make sure your post is actually accessible to everyone!
I am not blind or deaf so I don't depend on alt text, but I've never heard of anyone raising this as an issue on here.
And yeah, there just aren't enough characters in the main body of vanilla Mastodon to do this. Vanilla Masto's alt text character count is deliberately huge to compensate for this.
Maybe @weirdwriter could let us know what the situation is? Are alt texts sometimes inaccessible on the Fediverse? Should people be repeating alt text in body of post?
So, I'm totally blind, but at least on here, having the alt text in the actual media itself keeps the different third party apps functionality and makes it a far better experience for those using third party apps. I was told on the main Mastodon website the alt button needs to be bigger, like, when viewing alt text or images on timelines, but Tumblr doesn't have a whole host of third party app users. The fediverse does. There are third party apps that make the experience more accessible/present in a different way, in short, because that metadata is in the right place. While I think the alt edit field shouldn't have any limits at all, what usually happens is people stay on instances with only 500 characters for the post body and more for the alt. It wouldn't make sense if a person uses some of that 500 characters for an image description. Are their core things main Mastodon can do to make the experience better? Hell yes, but at the moment, this accessibility care is better than Tumblrs in this regard. Also, there are forks of Mastodon that are entertaining things like allow users to hide all media without a description. At least, they've entertained the idea but I've never seen it anywhere as of yet but if this does happen, and if a description is in the body rather than the alt section, your posts would technically be filtered out and hidden even though they do have media descriptions. @FediTips@raineyday
@FediTips@raineyday Also, other Fediverse apps use the alt attribute for media as well, so best to make sure they all at least have some standard metadata they can use in their own way if they so wish. Like I said, other projects, not Mastodon, are entertaining the idea of letting admins/ and or users disable media without descriptions in the metadata but nothings happened in this space yet, but they can entertain the thought because other projects can pull from that metadata, the alts.