#cwalttextmeta — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cwalttextmeta, aggregated by home.social.
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@Mark Wyner Won’t Comply :vm: First of all, you completely forgot the social media posters. The TOC link leads nowhere.
Also, maybe it's fair to mention that I'm working on an entire wiki about alt-texts and image descriptions, especially for the Fediverse. 46 pages are planned as of now, 24 of them are already written. These will include over 30 pages on how to do things, how not to do things and what never to do at all.
I won't add step-by-step guides for certain frontends. But I've already started adding rules and guidelines for how to describe images appropriately and write alt-texts in a way that won't break stuff anywhere.
Even if it's a very incomplete WIP, it's unique in several ways:- It's the only wiki about alt-texts and image descriptions. Few writers have even only written multiple pages or articles on this subject.
- It's the only guide that takes the existence of the Fediverse outside of Mastodon into consideration. This means that it's also the only guide that doesn't assume that Fediverse equals always having only 500 characters for the message text. It actually recommends an additional, longer image description in the message text in certain situations, regardless of whether or not vanilla Mastodon users can do that.
- It's the only guide that, instead of regurgitating the alt-text rules for webpages and blogs and assuming that they apply to the Fediverse just the same, talks about the peculiarities of posting images into the Fediverse, how Mastodon's alt-text quality criteria are different from the W3C WAI and WCAG alt-text quality criteria, and why it's critically important to know and fulfill Mastodon's requirements for good alt-texts.
- It's probably the only guide that doesn't assume that you can always precisely target a certain audience for your content and make sure that only those receive it who understand it right off the bat.
- It is the only guide that lists over 60 references, including your blog post, but also including university webpages as well as over two dozen guides from Veronica Lewis a.k.a. Veronica with Four Eyes.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta -
CW: Account getting away with way subpar alt-texts only because it's too niche with too few followers; CW: long (over 1,700 characters), Fediverse meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, character limit meta
I've just discovered a certain Mastodon account that seems to automatically post images of Second Life avatars. It can be lucky to only have eight followers, one of them being a search engine, the others being Second Life users.
If it had more follower, it would certainly already have met the wrath of the wider Mastodon community, especially the Mastodon HOA, for breaking Mastodon's unwritten rules.
And I'm not even talking about nigh-nudity in some of the images with no warning, no image flagging, no hashtag. I'm talking about the alt-texts that are vastly below Mastodon's requirements and quality standards for alt-texts.
Granted, all things considered, the requirements for good image descriptions by Mastodon's standards have to be extremely hard and tedious to meet, at least by my personal estimations. In fact, they have to be impossible to meet on Mastodon itself due to its tiny character limit, and if this account was somewhere where it could meet these requirements, it'd probably be blocked by loads of Mastodon accounts for its excessively long posts due to the long image descriptions.
But if more Mastodon users knew it right now, it'd probably be blocked by many more Mastodon accounts than follow it.
If you post from virtual worlds into the Fediverse, you simply cannot win in the long run. You'll lose either way.
#SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorld #VirtualWorlds #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Mastodon #MastodonHOA #MastodonCulture