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#imagedescriptions

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Jupiter Rowland
@iFixit
and it doesn't look like you can attach documents to posts

You can't on Mastodon. I could, both here on Hubzilla and on (streams) where I post my images.

But I wouldn't have to. Vanilla Mastodon has a character limit of 500. Hubzilla has a character "limit" that's so staggeringly high that nobody knows how high it is because it doesn't matter. (streams), from the same creator and the same software family as Hubzilla, has a character "limit" of over 24,000,000 which is not an arbitrary design decision but simply the size of the database field.

By the way: Both are in the Fediverse, and both are federated with Mastodon, so Mastodon's "all media must have accurate and sufficiently detailed descriptions" rule applies there as well unless you don't care if thousands upon thousands of Mastodon users block you for not supplying image and media descriptions.

In theory, I could publish a video of ten minutes, and in the same post, I could add a full, timestamped description that takes several hours to read. Verbatim transcript of all spoken words. Detailed description of the visuals where "detailed" means "as detailed as Mastodon loves its alt-texts" as in "800 characters of alt-text or more for a close-up of a single flower in front of a blurry background" detailed. Detailed description of all camera movements and cuts. Description of non-spoken-word noises. All timestamped, probably with over a hundred timestamps for the whole description of ten minutes of video.

Now I'm wondering if that could be helpful or actually required, or if it's overkill and actually a hindrance.

CC: @masukomi @GunChleoc

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #MediaDescription #MediaDescriptions
joinfediverse.wikiHubzilla - Join the Fediverse
#MediaDescriptions
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Jupiter Rowland
@sunflowerinrain @Tarnport From what I've read, a digital photograph is considered the default. So for brevity reasons, it must not be mentioned.

Any other media must be mentioned, whether it's a painting, a screenshot from a social media app, a scanned analogue photograph, a flowchart, a CAD blueprint, a 3-D rendering or whatever.

But an alt-text must never start with "Image of", "Picture of" or "Photo of". That's considered bad style and a waste of characters and screen-reading time. If the medium is not mentioned, digital photograph falls into its place as a default.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#cwimagedescriptionmeta
Replied to Alt Text Hall of Fame
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Jupiter Rowland
@Alt Text Hall of Fame @David Bloom Yes.

Explanations, or any other information available neither in the image nor in the post text, must never ever go into the alt-text. That's because not everyone can access alt-text. And to those who can't access alt-text, any information exclusively available in alt-text is inaccessible and therefore lost.

#AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#cwimagedescriptionmeta
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Jupiter Rowland
@Alan Levine Judging by the advice I've read so far, it's always best to describe the colour using basic colours plus attributes such as brightness, saturation and what other basic colour or colours the colour you describe is leaning towards.

For example, "light, yellowish orange", "a darker, slightly less saturated, slightly more brownish tone of orange", "various shades of slightly yellowish, medium-light-to-medium brown", "a solid, slightly pale medium blue with a minimal hint of green", "a medium-dark wood texture, slightly reddish, slightly greyish". All actually used by me in the long descriptions in (content warning: eye contact) this image post.

If the name of the colour plays a role, use it and then describe the colour in the same way as above. Blind or visually-impaired people may not know what Prussian blue or Burgundy red looks like.

@Stefan Bohacek @❄️Faerie❄️ @cobalt @Tanya McGee Wheatley 💜🥰 What do you say, is that appropriate, complete overkill or still insufficient?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
#cwimagedescriptionmeta
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Jupiter Rowland
@Robert Kingett
I should have blocked you the first 900 times you asked this fucking obtuse/C lioning/ ableist / patronizing question. If you don't wanna provide alt text, just don't do it and never ask me this question again.

If I didn't care for accessibility, if I didn't want to describe my images, why would I want to satisfy everyone, all the way to random strangers who stumble upon my posts in some federated timeline? I shouldn't even want to satisfy anyone!

Why would I spend literal days, morning to evening, describing one image in all details? Twice per image?

Why would I refuse to even take pictures, let alone post them, if they'll be too difficult to describe in a way that I consider sufficient?

Why would I pick up any advice on how to describe certain things, like people or colours, and consider any of my image descriptions that don't have this incorporated hopelessly outdated?

Why would I transcribe text that's too small for sighted people to read, just because all text in an image has to be described? Why would I feel bad about text that I couldn't transcribe and then try to find a source for that piece of text? And yes, I do.

Why would I be literally the only one in the entire Fediverse who tries to tell people that and why explanations don't go into the alt-text because people with certain disabilities can't access alt-text, and any information that's only available in alt-text is lost to them?

And why would I warn sensitive people about eyes or food that's in the image on a microscopic sub-pixel level if I didn't care? And yes, I actually did that. In my post with my second-longest image description.

Just because I don't just simply shut up and describe my images exactly on point like you personally want them described, doesn't justify insulting me as an ableist.

CC: @Alina Leonova

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism
hub.netzgemeinde.euUniversal Campus: The mother of all mega-regionsOpenSim's famous Universal Campus and a picture of its main building; CW: long (62,514 characters, including 1,747 characters of actual post text and 60,553 characters of image description)
#ableism
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Jupiter Rowland
@Robert Kingett Honest question from an alt-text and image description perfectionist to a blind user: When is it actually accessible enough that whoever posts an image doesn't have to fear repercussions?

Okay, there has to be an alt-text. It has to actually describe the image. So much is clear to me.

And I guess that while at least some blind people in the Fediverse treasure whimsy higher than accuracy, others may want alt-text to be accurate.

But it looks to me like there is a rather narrow margin between alt-text with not enough details and alt-text that's too long and/or too detailed. This isn't communicated anywhere. It's unclear, too, whether that margin is always the same, or whether it shifts with the content of the image, the context and someone's individual idea of who the audience of an image post is.

And seriously, there are images that simply cannot be described in a way that's perfectly ideal and useful for absolutely everyone out there. I've posted such images in the past, and my image descriptions must have broken all length records in the Fediverse. But I think not everyone is happy about having to read through such monsters.

CC: @Stefan Bohacek @Olivier Mehani @Alina Leonova

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#cwimagedescriptionmeta
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Stefan Bohacek

I find myself having to search through my old and bookmarked posts when the topic of alt text on social media comes up, so I'm just going to put some of the relevant polls I've posted over the past few months here on my blog.

stefanbohacek.com/blog/polls-a

A tinted screenshot showing two Mastodon posts with polls. All text is replaced with dark blocks as if it has been censored.
stefanbohacek.comPolls and other insights about the use of alt text on social media | Stefan Bohacek
More from Stefan Bohacek
#AltText#SocialMedia#ImageDescriptions
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Jupiter Rowland
@Ciara And yet, there are people trying to talk me out of it. For example, I shouldn't transcribe text that's so tiny that it isn't even recognisable in the image as text because it's only a blob of a dozen pixels. They say that 40,000 or 60,000 characters of description and explanations for one image are too much.

The only thing I'm reconsidering myself currently is whether to keep these monster descriptions in the post or put them into external documents and link to them.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
#cwimagedescriptionmeta
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Jupiter Rowland
@Ciara @Boab I guess there are enough signs that my image descriptions are hand-written, especially for my original virtual world renderings.

  • Alt-texts which lately keep reaching exactly 1,500 characters or only few characters short of that limit.
  • Alt-texts that also mention an even longer image description in the post. And there is an even longer image description in the post. Who asks an AI to describe an image in lots of details and then again in even more details?
  • No AI can produce image descriptions with five-digit character counts like the long one in the post.
  • Excessive detail information about an absolutely obscure niche topic in the long description.
  • Description of visual details that aren't visible at the image's resolution.
  • Transcripts of text that isn't legible or not even visible at the image's resolution.
  • Sometimes I run an extra thread with an image-describing log.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Mastodon.greenCiara (@CiaraNi@mastodon.green)13.2K Posts, 2.29K Following, 2.53K Followers · I post about books. I post photos I snap while wandering about. I post in English, dansk and Danglish. I mostly hang around these spaces: #Books #Audiobooks #ShortStories #Libraries #Bibliotek #Fredagsbog #SilentSunday #ClimateDiary #Aarhus Banner: Aarhus skyline and bay. Profile pic: Me, white, dark shortish hair, tallish, emerging from a tunnel, smiling, happy, wearing a bright red leopard-print dress because that’s the sort of thing a woman in her 50s can happily wear because who cares.
#cwimagedescriptionmeta
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Jupiter Rowland
@Skip Lacaze @Robert Kingett, blind What I do with my original images may seem a bit extreme, but still:

I give a full, detailed image description in the post itself. I don't have any character limit to worry about. Before I run out of characters, my posts grow so long that Mastodon rejects them, and AFAIK, Mastodon rejects anything over 100,000 characters.

That long description in the post contains all necessary explanations and transcripts of all text within the borders of the image. I need that description in the post because it's magnitudes too long to work in alt-text anywhere in the Fediverse.

But only an image description in a post might not satisfy the alt-text police who absolutely demand there be a useful alt-text with a good image description for each image. After all, they can't see the long description right away because the whole post is hidden behind a summary and content warning.

So I write an additional, much shorter image description just for the alt-text.

Also in the alt-text, after the short image description, there is a note that a full and more detailed image description with explanation and text transcripts in the post. If you're on Mastodon, Misskey or any of their forks, it is hidden behind a summary and content warning. If you're on Pleroma, Akkoma, Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) or anything else that supports in-line images, it follows right after the image.

That is, "short" is relative. As of recently, my alt-texts either reach the 1,500-character mark precisely, or they stop short of one or two characters.

I can only do without the long image description in the post when I post memes based on existing templates. The image description doesn't have to be so long and detailed, and it fits into the alt-text.

I'm still not sure whether I'll still put all explanations to understand the meme and its own explanation into the post, or whether I'll switch to simply linking to Web sites that explain these things such as KnowYourMeme or the Join the Fediverse Wiki.

Both would be inconvenient in their own ways, either the inconvenience of external links or the inconvenience of tens of thousands of characters of explanations in one place. But links would be much less work for me, and my meme post output would be higher. On the other hand, there are still things without sufficient explanations anywhere on the Web.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Know Your MemeKnow Your MemeKnow Your Meme is a website dedicated to documenting Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.
#cwimagedescriptionmeta
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Jupiter Rowland
@Robert Kingett, blind I'm on Hubzilla. It normally doesn't have Mastodon's CW culture, also because it has its own older and, in the opinion of most users, better solution. Still, since most of my readers are on Mastodon, I normally add a Mastodon-style CW along with a Hubzilla-style summary. The only exceptions are replies for which Hubzilla does not provide a summary field to put a Mastodon-style CW into.

In the case of the start post, the summary and CW would have read, quote:

"Request for advice: Do you prefer links to external explanations or 25,000 characters of explanations in the post itself? CW: long (over 3,800 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse beyond Mastodon meta, image description meta"

End of quote.

This one time, I intentionally made an exception and omitted the summary and CW. I guessed that my summaries and CWs actually kept many Mastodon users from accessing my posts. I guessed that this could have been a contributing factor to my complete lack of success in gathering advice and feedback for image descriptions lately.

As for my explanations, I always write them myself. I have to match them to each other and, if the image isn't a meme, the long visual description. And sometimes there are no explanations that I could link to because what has to be explained is too obscure.

So if you prefer explanations in the post, do you still prefer them if they're excessively long? Like one image that goes with nine explanations of altogether 25,000 characters? I've actually recently written just that, and I think it was more than reasonable.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Memes #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#accessibility
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Jupiter Rowland
@Elena Brescacin @Charlotte Joanne @Andre Louis @Pratik Patel @Devin Prater :blind: @Robert Kingett, blind

I'm terribly sorry for writing to you out of the blue, but absolutely all more acceptable ways of trying to get some feedback or advice from Mastodon users have failed me this week. And I take it that you are in the right position to give me competent feedback or advice in accessibility.

So here's my question right away: What do blind users prefer when it comes to explaining images? Externally linked explanations? Or everything explained in the post, even if this amounts to tens of thousands of characters of only explanation?

Now allow me to elaborate. This is going to be long.

I am someone who always tries to get image descriptions and explanations as right as possible. You may or may know that already.

So here's the thing: I've started posting memes again just recently. And I'm trying hard to max out the accessibility of my meme posts. Since I'm not on Mastodon, I don't have Mastodon's limitations in my way. In particular, I don't have character limits to worry about. This means that I can describe and especially explain a whole lot of things in the post itself rather than having to squeeze it into the alt-text.

Until now, it has always looked to me like it's better to give all necessary explanations in the post than to link to external explanations. One or a few people have told me so. And I've run a poll a while ago, and eight out of the nine sighted voters as well as the one sole non-sighted voter preferred explanations in the post over externally-linked explanations.

Now, if I want to explain a meme post in a way that everyone understands it, I have to explain a lot. I've written a half-experimental meme post based on the "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" meme. Here is a link to that post.

So I had to explain the post itself. But I also had to explain the "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" meme. In order for people to understand that explanation, I had to explain snowclones, image macros and advice animals. In order for people to understand these three extra explanations, I also had to explain Something Awful and 4chan including a general explanation of imageboards. Also, in order for people to understand my post, I had to explain FEP-ef61, nomadic identity, Hubzilla, the streams repository and the whole 14-year history of the latter two from Mistpark from 2010 to this year's Forte and their various underlying protocols.

That one meme post required nine explanations with some 25,000 characters. And in fact, I could have explained The Lord of the Rings and the ActivityPub protocol on top of that, but I took both for common enough knowledge that my post is understandable enough without explaining them.

Again, 25,000 characters of explanations for one image, just so the image can be understood without any external information. Apparently, it's exactly this which the Fediverse prefers.

But I can't believe that this is actually what the Fediverse prefers. First of all, I've been told again and again that tens of thousands of characters are not accessible because they're much too long, regardless of where I put them. It's hard to believe that they're supposed to still be more accessible than external links. Besides, my information almost entirely comes from sighted people.

So here's my question again: Do blind people really prefer 25,000 characters of explanation for one meme post over externally-linked explanations?

(Deliberately without a content warning this time to make this post more easily accessible.)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Memes #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility
#accessibility
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Jupiter Rowland
This might go further than I've expected.

Whenever I post a meme about nomadic identity, I'll have to explain nomadic identity in the post. But I'll probably also always have to explain Hubzilla and the streams repository and their entire family tree of forks so that people understand my explanation of nomadic identity.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Memes
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#memes
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Jupiter Rowland
@Spooky Panda Bear 🌈 Quick and easy solution:

Move away from Mastodon. Go someplace else in the Fediverse that doesn't have a 500-character limit.

Move to Pleroma (5,000 characters, configurable by admin).
Or Akkoma (5,000 characters, configurable by admin).
Or Misskey (3,000 characters, hard-coded).
Or one of the several Misskey forks (thousands of characters again, configurable by admin).
Or Friendica (unlimited characters).
Or Hubzilla (unlimited characters).
Or (streams) (unlimited characters; that is, the database can handle a bit over 65,000 characters on older instances with no database upgrade and over 24,000,000 characters otherwise).

All of them are in the Fediverse. The Fediverse is not only Mastodon. All of them are connected to Mastodon. Proof: This comment comes from Hubzilla.

And then do something that nobody on Mastodon would even come up with the idea to do:

Put the excerpt into the post.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NotOnlyMastodon #FediverseIsNotMastodon #MastodonIsNotTheFediverse #Pleroma #Akkoma #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Firefish #Iceshrimp #Sharkey #Catodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #500Characters
hub.netzgemeinde.euNetzgemeinde/Hubzilla
#500characters
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