#fediversemeta — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #fediversemeta, aggregated by home.social.
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@Nicolas Mouart noPhD, noMA No. I'm someone who wants to write image descriptions and alt-text not somehow, but the best way I can.
For this, I've been gathering information from a whole lot of sources for more than three years. More recently, I've started compiling it in a wiki so I can share it with others. When the wiki is done, it will have over 30 individual rules and guidelines for describing images and writing alt-texts.
125 characters as a limit are widespread because screen readers used to have a 125-character hard cap at some point in the 2010s or so. They simply couldn't read alt-texts beyond the 125-character mark. A while later, the hard limit was raised to 200 characters.
Nowadays, there is no hard character limit in screen readers to speak of anymore. Mastodon user @Eric Eggert says so, too: https://yatil.net/blog/there-is-no-character-limit-for-alt-text
The lowest actual character limit that must be heeded in the Fediverse is 512 characters. It is imposed by Misskey, a microblogging server application that's part of the Fediverse and fully federated with Mastodon, but more powerful than Mastodon (https://misskey-hub.net/en/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misskey), as well as its various forks and forks of forks such as Calckey (defunct, but servers still exist), Firefish (ditto), Iceshrimp-JS, Sharkey, Catodon or CherryPick.
By design, Misskey is supposed to truncate alt-texts that are longer than 512 characters at the 512-character mark. However, due to a bug that still isn't fixed, it deletes the alt-text instead. The same applies to all the "Forkeys". If you write a longer alt-text, users on Misskey and the Forkeys will believe you haven't supplied an alt-text to begin with. You take a big effort upon you and write this monster of an alt-text, and regardless, users on Misskey, Sharkey & Co. will think you're another ableist swine who can't be bothered.
The only other thing that speaks against the 1000+-character alt-texts that are so popular on Mastodon is simply useability: A screen reader can navigate normal text, i.e. "rewind" a few words or to the beginning of the sentence of whatever. It can't navigate alt-text in this way, though. So let's suppose you're having a 1000-character alt-text read out to you. Around the 900-character mark, something distracts you. You have to have the last sentence re-read. No dice. The only thing the screen reader can do is jump back to the beginning of the alt-text and re-read the whole thing.
Still, Mastodon, being as Mastodon-centric as it has always been, loves long alt-texts. For one, it loves to use alt-texts to write around the 500-character limit which, by the way, is very bad.
But it also appears to love long and detailed image descriptions. They appear to have become part of Mastodon's culture. I'm actually waiting for Fediverse users being sanctioned in some way for providing alt-texts that adhere to Web accessibility standards, but that are too short for at least some Mastodon users' standards. In fact, I'm waiting for the first Mastodon user sanctioning someone else because they consider an alt-text of 500 characters too short and lacking details.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Iceshrimp #IceshrimpJS #Sharkey #Catodon #CherryPick #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta -
@Nicolas Mouart noPhD, noMA No. I'm someone who wants to write image descriptions and alt-text not somehow, but the best way I can.
For this, I've been gathering information from a whole lot of sources for more than three years. More recently, I've started compiling it in a wiki so I can share it with others. When the wiki is done, it will have over 30 individual rules and guidelines for describing images and writing alt-texts.
125 characters as a limit are widespread because screen readers used to have a 125-character hard cap at some point in the 2010s or so. They simply couldn't read alt-texts beyond the 125-character mark. A while later, the hard limit was raised to 200 characters.
Nowadays, there is no hard character limit in screen readers to speak of anymore. Mastodon user @Eric Eggert says so, too: https://yatil.net/blog/there-is-no-character-limit-for-alt-text
The lowest actual character limit that must be heeded in the Fediverse is 512 characters. It is imposed by Misskey, a microblogging server application that's part of the Fediverse and fully federated with Mastodon, but more powerful than Mastodon (https://misskey-hub.net/en/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misskey), as well as its various forks and forks of forks such as Calckey (defunct, but servers still exist), Firefish (ditto), Iceshrimp-JS, Sharkey, Catodon or CherryPick.
By design, Misskey is supposed to truncate alt-texts that are longer than 512 characters at the 512-character mark. However, due to a bug that still isn't fixed, it deletes the alt-text instead. The same applies to all the "Forkeys". If you write a longer alt-text, users on Misskey and the Forkeys will believe you haven't supplied an alt-text to begin with. You take a big effort upon you and write this monster of an alt-text, and regardless, users on Misskey, Sharkey & Co. will think you're another ableist swine who can't be bothered.
The only other thing that speaks against the 1000+-character alt-texts that are so popular on Mastodon is simply useability: A screen reader can navigate normal text, i.e. "rewind" a few words or to the beginning of the sentence of whatever. It can't navigate alt-text in this way, though. So let's suppose you're having a 1000-character alt-text read out to you. Around the 900-character mark, something distracts you. You have to have the last sentence re-read. No dice. The only thing the screen reader can do is jump back to the beginning of the alt-text and re-read the whole thing.
Still, Mastodon, being as Mastodon-centric as it has always been, loves long alt-texts. For one, it loves to use alt-texts to write around the 500-character limit which, by the way, is very bad.
But it also appears to love long and detailed image descriptions. They appear to have become part of Mastodon's culture. I'm actually waiting for Fediverse users being sanctioned in some way for providing alt-texts that adhere to Web accessibility standards, but that are too short for at least some Mastodon users' standards. In fact, I'm waiting for the first Mastodon user sanctioning someone else because they consider an alt-text of 500 characters too short and lacking details.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Calckey #Firefish #Iceshrimp #IceshrimpJS #Sharkey #Catodon #CherryPick #MastodonCulture #MastodonCentricity #MastodonNormativity #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta -
@Dustin @Markus Redeker 🐘 @Elmar Billen Moment, mal langsam.
Es dürfen nie Informationen ausschließlich im Alt-Text verfügbar sein! Keine Erklärungen und auch sonst nichts.
Alles an schriftlichen Informationen, was für sehende Menschen nicht aus dem Bild direkt ersichtlich ist, gehört in den Beitragstext.
Der Grund ist: Es gibt Menschen, die an Alt-Texte nicht herankommen.
Man braucht ja, um an einen Alt-Text heranzukommen, einen Touchscreen oder so etwas wie eine Maus. Manche Menschen können aber aufgrund körperlicher Behinderungen beides nur schlecht oder gar nicht bedienen, z. B., weil sie einen sehr starken Tremor haben (Parkinson o. ä.) oder gleich überhaupt keine Hände. Trotzdem können sie einen Computer bedienen. Aber sie können eben keine kleine "Alt"-Schaltfläche klicken oder tippen und auch keinen Mauscursor auf ein Bild schieben und ihn da liegenlassen.
Andere haben selbstauferlegte technische Einschränkungen. Manche Hardcore-Linux-Nutzer haben sich entschieden für einen super-leichtgewichtigen, spartanischen Fenstermanager wie i3wm oder ratpoison, der aber keine Unterstützung für eine Maus hat. Es dürfte aber wohl kein Web-Frontend im Fediverse geben, wo man den Alt-Text eines Bildes mit einem Tastatur-Shortcut öffnen kann.
Was im Alt-Text steht, können diese Menschen nicht lesen, weil sie den Alt-Text gar nicht erst öffnen können. Das heißt: Informationen, die nur im Alt-Text stehen, sind ihnen verwehrt.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #LangerPost #CWLangerPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta #Inklusion #Barrierefreiheit -
@Dustin Hier bin ich ein bißchen im Zwiespalt.
Einerseits sagt dir jeder Alt-Text-Guide im Web, daß Alt-Texte kurz und prägnant sein müssen. Andererseits liebt die Mastodon-Kultur aber detaillierte Bildbeschreibungen. So manch einem Mastodon-Nutzer wird das hier zu knapp sein.
#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #Bildbeschreibung #Bildbeschreibungen #BildbeschreibungenMeta #CWBildbeschreibungenMeta