#imagedescriptionmeta — Public Fediverse posts

@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.

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@Roland Häder

So how do they think it can be enforced everywhere?

Just like they try to enforce anything everywhere.

• They'll simply tell you to do it.
• They'll lecture you about it.
• They'll call you out if you don't do it.
• Once they've caught you not doing it repeatedly, they'll insult you as ableist.
• They'll block you. Before they block you, they'll announce in public that they'll block you because you're an ableist swine who refuses to add alt-text to his images, and they'll mention you so that you can see it.
  If you're only here to get and stay in contact with a select few people, none of whom are on Mastodon, you might not care.
  But if you need a certain amount of reach especially on Mastodon, this is bad.

I've seen all the above actually happen.

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@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp Let me give you an example. Something that I've actually posted myself.

Here's the image (CW: eye contact): https://streams.elsmussols.net/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/ff28c33e-f633-4801-ad2b-c3dcd40d7bf9

Here's the alt-text:

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

Do you understand the image without explanations?

I guarantee you that there are loads of people who don't even understand the template, and that next to nobody out there understands the topic. Not without an explanation.

So here's the explanation in the post text, including a link to the corresponding KnowYourMeme page:

Explanation:

The image macro is based on the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template (link CW: eye contact; https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mine-mine-mine-seagulls).

OSgrid (https://osgrid.org) is a 3-D virtual world, based on OpenSimulator (http://opensimulator.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator; https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/ba1b1cb6-7c18-410e-8752-df4b4face2e0), a free, open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life (https://www.secondlife.com; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). Like Second Life and all other OpenSimulator-based worlds, it is called a "grid" because it is divided into square regions bordering on each other.

Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSimulator grid, it is the oldest and one of the biggest by both land area and users. This means that while it's running bleeding-edge developer versions of OpenSimulator, it also carries around a whole lot of old ballast. It is notorious for going offline for maintenance and for this maintenance often lasting for a week or several, and it is just as notorious for going offline with no announcement and either only a very belated explanation by the admins or none at all.

The last prolonged downtime before this one was in 2025. It included OSgrid's entire asset server being wiped clean, and all avatars in OSgrid having their inventories emptied almost completely. It was scheduled, but due to OSgrid's instability at the time, it happened spontaneously and way ahead of schedule. The OSgrid admins could not say for how long OSgrid would be offline, but they estimated the downtime to exceed one month. In addition, for several years before that shutdown, each OSgrid shutdown had led to more and more lost assets already.

This drove many OSgrid residents away from OSgrid and to other OpenSimulator grids. Most of them, OSgrid included, are connected by the so-called Hypergrid which makes it possible for avatars from one grid to teleport to other grids, so it doesn't matter much which grid your avatar is registered on when you want to travel to certain locations or events. Many of those who had left OSgrid when it was offline returned after it went online again because the asset server had been promised to work as intended now.

Still, with OSgrid's track record of unreliability and, most importantly, losing assets, some residents fear that the current downtime might break more than it will fix. Not few think that if they've lost their whole inventories "unannounced" last time, they will lose their whole inventories actually unannounced this time. And so they're looking for a new home again.

Of course, this has the owners and admins of many other grids wishing for as many OSgrid residents as possible to join their grids. The advertising of other grids in the wake of OSgrid's downtime has already begun.

Now, there are people who say that linking to external explanations is ableist crap because that's inconvenient, and because these external websites may not be sufficiently accessible. Oh, and links don't work in alt-text (only that the above link went into the post text where links do work). So if you post something that needs to be explained, explain it yourself.

Sure, but that'll be an explanation of the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template. In addition, there will have to be one explanation for Reddit and one for reaction images because people won't understand the template explanation otherwise. On top of that, there will have to be an explanation for image boards, Futaba Channel and 4chan because people won't understand the reaction image explanation otherwise. In fact, I might also have to explain the film Finding Nemo.

For comparison, I've once posted something based on "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor". It was the only time I've explained the whole thing myself. That was one explanation for my image, six for the template, two for the topic (and that was actually Fediverse-related, but still obscure), that's nine altogether. I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings, the character Boromir and that particular situation. Still, that was 25,000 characters of explanation overall, half of which accounted for the six explanations for the template.

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@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp I'm not talking about the visual description in the alt-text.

I'm talking about a wholly separate explanation in the post text body. Like, where you'd write the actual toot. Where you probably only have 500 characters. Where you wrote the above comment. It's there where I want to put the explanation.

The story behind this is as follows:

I keep reading from Mastodon users that alt-texts (yes, actual alt-texts in this case) are useful for sighted people, too, because alt-texts can give them explanations and help them understand what they're looking at. This means that images must not only be described, but also explained if necessary.

On the one hand, I keep telling Mastodon users again and again that explanations do not belong into the alt-text because there are people who can't access and read alt-texts; Mastodon users tend to be very defensive of using alt-texts to extend their 500-character limit by another 1,500 characters per image.

Still, on the other hand, this means that especially Mastodon users want images that they don't understand to come with explanations right away. In particular, neurodivergent people often need explanations, in-depth explanations even. It appears to have gotten to a point where posting an image that needs explanations without explanations is considered just as careless and almost as ableist as posting an image without accurate and sufficiently detailed alt-text.

At the same time, whenever I post an image of any kind, memes included, they're about such obscure topics that they need an explanation. Also, not everyone is always familiar with every meme template, so I have to give an explanation for the meme templates I've used as well. So I always explain whatever might need to be explained.

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@🌱🏴‍🅰️🏳️‍⚧️🐧🔧📎 Ambiyelp Question about describing memes, just to be on the safe side.

Let's assume my character limit is not 500, but practically unlimited. Like, tens of thousands of times higher than on Mastodon.

Let's also assume I don't have a problem with writing a whole lot of text, for while most of the Fediverse is fumbling around on a phone screen, I'm blind-typing on a hardware keyboard.

How would you recommend me to explain meme templates in the post text (in addition to the visual description + text transcripts in the alt-text)?

• not at all (leaves people clueless)
• with one link to KnowYourMeme per used template (links are inconvenient, and the linked websites aren't necessarily sufficiently accessible)
• no links, but a full, in-depth set of KnowYourMeme-level explanations down to the basics (that's 10,000+ extra characters in that one post)
• same, but chopped into bits of no more than 500 characters (that's a thread of 30, 40, 50, 60 or more short posts)

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@Tom Cole It is available everywhere AFAIK.

But: The convenient black "Alt" button in the corner is exclusive to Mastodon's Web interface plus maybe a few phone apps that have adopted it since. Technically speaking, a UI element to show alt-texts is completely unnecessary because alt-text is only a stand-in for the image itself, for when the image cannot be seen for whichever reason. The alt-text as an extra source of information is a purely Mastodon thing where people use it to expand their meagre 500-character limit by up to another 6,000 characters.

Just about everywhere else in the Fediverse, there is no button for showing alt-texts. That's also because there's nowhere in the Fediverse where people really need alt-texts to write around their tiny character limits, so that alt-texts can be what alt-texts are literally everywhere outside of Mastodon: a stand-in for the image and nothing more than that.

The normal way in the Fediverse (and other social networks and social media) for sighted people to access an alt-text is by moving the mouse cursor upon the image and hovering in there, and the alt-text pops up. The alt-text is the title tag at the same time. This has been the case on Mastodon before, I think, version 4.4 as well. I guess Mastodon changed that because just about everyone on Mastodon is on phones, and you don't have a mouse cursor on a phone, so you have to long-press on the image which is a not very intuitive thing to do.

Here on Hubzilla where I'm commenting from right now, the alt-text still is the title tag as well. In order to read an alt-text, the mouse cursor has to be hovered above the image. And Hubzilla has no alternative to its Web interface, only different themes for the Web interface. There is no phone app, at least none worth speaking of.

Also, on Hubzilla, we don't need to use alt-texts to write around character limits. Our character limit is 16,777,215, and that's the maximum size of the database field for the message text. Actually, on Hubzilla, alt-texts are included in these over 16 million characters as opposed to separate data fields. Thus, sighted Hubzilla users have no use for alt-texts whatsoever. Thus, there's no reason to make opening alt-texts easier (as if that was Hubzilla's only UI issue). Thus, there's no "Alt" button, and there will never be one.

It's just about the same just about everywhere else from Misskey (hard-coded 3,000 characters) to Akkoma (configurable 5,000 characters) to Friendica (same limit as Hubzilla) to (streams) and Forte (over 24 million characters) to pure long-form blogging stuff like WordPress, Ghost, Write Freely and Plume.

Now I ask you: What are people supposed to do whose both hands had to be amputated due to some accident? Or people with deformed hands who can neither use a smartphone nor a computer mouse nor a trackball nor any other pointing device on a computer? Who operate their computer with e.g. a headpointer, a plastic stick strapped to their forehead with which they poke the keys on their computer? And who are in the Fediverse, but not on Mastodon? How are they supposed to open an alt-text with only a keyboard as an input device?

Or how about people with a severe tremor? Who have big troubles moving a mouse cursor over an image and then keeping it there because it keeps slipping away? Who probably operate their computers via the keyboard and only the keyboard, too?

Or, a wholly different example, how about those who use Linux with a super-minimalist, keyboard-only tiling window manager? Who do have a GUI (albeit a very frugal one), who do use graphical Web browsers, but who deliberately, intentionaly, do not have any kind of pointing device? Who, nonetheless, are ten times faster with only keyboard shortcuts than you and me are with a mouse? How are they supposed to move a mouse cursor over an image without a mouse?

This is something that many Mastodon users don't know:

• Not all Fediverse frontends have an "Alt" button.
• "Alt" buttons make no sense in the non-Mastodon Fediverse. In the non-Mastodon Fediverse, the character limits are so high that nobody has to use alt-texts to write around them. Expanding the character limit with alt-texts is a 100% Mastodon-only thing that simply doesn't translate to places with thousands or millions of characters and never will.
• There are other disabilities out there than visual impairments and neurodivergence. Even in the Fediverse.
• Not everyone in the Fediverse uses a pointing device of whichever sorts.

Oh, and there's one more thing: Misskey and its various forks (Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS, CherryPick etc.) all have a character limit of 512 for alt-texts. They should enforce it the same way as Mastodon enforces its 1,500-character limit for alt-texts, namely by truncating longer alt-texts. This is bad enough already.

However, they all have the same nasty bug that still hasn't been fixed yet AFAIK: Instead of truncating longer alt-texts, they delete them. So if you describe your image in an alt-text of more than 512 characters, users on Misskey, Sharkey & Co. will never know that your image is supposed to have an alt-text. Instead, they may think that you were too lazy to describe your image. And if you use the alt-text to explain your image in over 512 characters, this explanation will never reach users on Misskey, Sharkey & Co.

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@DopeGhoti @Andrew How many characters would be sufficient for Mastodon to not count as ableist anymore?

If you say, 1,500, who or what says that 1,500 characters are sufficient to describe any and all images, but a lower limit is not?

For comparison, look at my cover photo. The one with the weird building. I have a post with just about the same image in it; here's the link.

In this post, the image has two separate image descriptions. One is in the alt-text. The alt-text is exactly 1,500 characters long, a bit over 1,400 of which are image description. And that's the short description. It doesn't even have room for any text transcripts. It actually isn't much more than an "alibi description". It's only there because many people on Mastodon demand there be a 100% accurate and sufficiently detailed image description in the alt-text of each image in the Fediverse.

Only that "sufficiently detailed" isn't always possible even in 1,500 characters.

That's why there is an additional long description in the post text. It's sufficiently detailed, as in, fully detailed. An image like this requires a fully detailed description. It comes with transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, and it comes with all explanations necessary to understand the image and the description. It's over 60,000 characters long.

Yes, over 60,000 characters in one post. Your character limit is 500. Mine is over 16 million.

Oh, and yes, it's guaranteed to be 100% hand-written. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research for and write the long description with literally absolutely no help from any AI whatsoever. In fact, I've described details that no AI on the planet will ever be able to see in the image.

So ideally, all Fediverse server platforms should have two image description fields for each profile image, one being the alt-text behind the image, one being a long description next to the image. The latter should not have an arbitrarily-chosen character limit.

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@Stefan Bohacek @Blorbo Admin Chicken Yes, I wish more servers had this rule and enforced it.

Officially appointed moderators only go by the server's written rules, and they only enforce them against local users.

The HOA, on the other hand, have some rules in their heads. Everyone has different rules. And they enforce them against everyone, even regardless of where everyone actually is. Like, they attack Friendica users for allegedly misusing the CW field because they neither know that these users are not on Mastodon, much less where they actually are, nor that Mastodon's CW field has been an abstract field on Friendica for seven years longer than it has been a CW field on Mastodon.

This is part of what makes the Fediverse a minefield once your messages start reaching Mastodon.

I can't say that I'll stop being so overly careful with everything and putting such a big effort particulary into image descriptions, summaries/content warnings and hashtags for filter-triggering purposes if more or even most Mastodon servers adopt and enforce this rule. The irony is that this rule actually protects my long hashtag lines.

In fact, rules like these also ought to include that nobody must be policed for writing "too long" posts because there are places in the Fediverse that neither have character limits to worry about nor a character-limiting culture.

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@Hazelnoot My goal is to get alt-texts and image descriptions right. As right as possible.

My goal is to not be sanctioned and/or lectured by the alt-text police for allegedly being lazy and/or careless.

In order to achieve that, I must be ahead of everyone's requirements. Whatever these requirements may be.

But in order to achieve that, I must know their requirements. Everyone's requirements.

If you want me to follow your rules, I need to know your rules.

Right now, I'm probably vastly overcompliant with everyone's rules with only a few exceptions that I can't comply with (alt-texts must not be longer than 200 or 125 or 100 characters, posts in the Fediverse must not be longer than 500 characters, all of the text in an image must always be transcribed in the alt-text etc.).

This way, I hope that my image posts will stay in compliance with existing image description quality standards for a few years, and when they no longer are, they're so old that nobody demands I upgrade my image descriptions to then-current standards.

tl;dr: "Just do it" doesn't cut it. Just doing it is likely to get you sanctioned because you don't do it well enough. And something is no longer better than nothing.

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@[18+!!] saph I'm not an artist, but I really need to know the definition of "helpful" in the context of "helpful alt-text". What are the requirements for alt-text to count as "helpful"?

It must be 100% accurate, I guess that's a given. This also means that it must be 100% written by hand as opposed to AI-generated.

But what are the minimum requirements in terms of details for an alt-text to be helpful?

Can alt-text be too long/too detailed to be helpful?

I'm going to limit my alt-texts to a maximum of 512 characters. Misskey, Sharkey, Iceshrimp-JS and the other Misskey forks automatically delete any alt-text that's longer than 512 characters, making it appear like I hadn't provided any alt-text to begin with, that's why. Newspaper scans aside, can alt-text with no more than 512 characters be too lacking in detail to be helpful?

What if, in addition to an alt-text with a maximum of 512 characters, I also provide a much longer and much more detailed image description in the post text? (My character limit is not 500, but over 16.7 million. I can post long descriptions with tens of thousands of characters in one piece, and I have done so in the past.)

Would that be acceptable to provide the details in description that do not fit into an alt-text of no more than 512 characters?

Or is that unacceptable because the description in the alt-text must be as detailed as required, and additional descriptions in the post don't count?

Or is that unacceptable because there must only be one description to each image, namely in the alt-text and only in the alt-text?

Or is that unacceptable because it makes my post longer than 500 characters?

Are explanations and other additional information about the image allowed in the post text? Because they are not allowed in the alt-text because some people cannot access alt-text.

Or must explanations etc. absolutely be in the alt-text in order for the alt-text to be "helpful" enough?

Must they even be only in the alt-text so that the post never exceeds 500 characters?

What if I can't describe and explain my images in a maximum of 512 characters? What if I can't describe and explain my images in a maximum of 1,500 characters either, but I absolutely must describe and explain them in the alt-text?

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@hosh The alt-text police of the Mastodon Home Owners' Association (Mastodon HOA) have a tendency to be overzealous. And they don't talk to each other. They all act for themselves as lone wolves with exactly no coordination amongst each other whatsoever. You never know what kinds of rules they whip up for themselves.

Chances are that they only let image descriptions count that come directly with the image. If they acknowledge an image description outside the alt-text, it must be in the post itself. Not as an external link, but the description text itself.

Besides, at least some in the Mastodon HOA have problems with external links. And I don't just mean that they don't trust embedded links whose URL they can't see in plain sight, the kind that Hubzilla can create and Mastodon can't (not that Hubzilla couldn't fake a plain-sight link by embedding a different URL than the visible).

I don't mean either that probably a majority of Mastodon users don't even recognise embedded links without a visible URL as such because they don't know that such a thing can exist in the Fediverse, because Mastodon can't make them.

No, what I mean is the notion that external links for explanations are inherently bad from an accessibility point of view. "Mastodon" (as in how Mastodon users experience the Fediverse, i.e. the Mastodon Web UI or any of the popular mobile phone apps) is sufficiently accessible. But the Web outside of "Mastodon" (same definition again) may not be accessible enough.

A few years ago, I've literally read a Mastodon toot in which someone said that explanations must not be linked to. Linked websites have a risk of not being accessible. Explanations must always be directly in the same post. Apparently, they thought that everything and anything can be explained and broken down until everyone understands it within 500 characters.

This is also why Mastodon users tend to explain their images in the alt-text. It's only there where they have at least halfway enough characters for an explanation, 1,500 per image as opposed to usually only 500 in the post text. (On Mastodon, much unlike Hubzilla, the alt-text is a separate database field that exists separately for each of the up to four images per message.)

That is, explanations must never go into the alt-text because there are people who cannot open alt-texts to read them. But nobody on Mastodon knows that.

It should be obvious that what counts for explanations counts for visual descriptions just as well.

And in fact, regarding Hubzilla articles, they're actually right. I've once pointed an actually blind screen reader user to an article on my Hubzilla channel. She said she couldn't even navigate the Web interface. She literally couldn't get to the text body of the article to have it read out by her screen reader.

Hubzilla's Web interface, no matter which app is opened, is not accessible. It does not work with screen readers. It's largely still stuck in 2012 when nobdy made any ruckus about the accessibility of hobbyist Web projects.

The only reason why at least some blind or visually-impaired users can read our Hubzilla posts and comments and DMs is because they're all on Mastodon, and they read our content either on Mastodon's Web UI or a Mastodon app that supports screen readers. But they do not read our content at the source. Because they can't.

I actually took into consideration linking to my long image descriptions. But my idea was not to link to a Hubzilla article, nor to a Hubzilla wiki or a Hubzilla card. No, my idea was to write a plain HTML document, upload it to my file space and link to that.

I've dropped that idea for various reasons:

• Generally, still, external links are frowned upon.
• I don't know if plain HTML is accessible without a CSS. And I can't add a CSS to this HTML if the HTML document is not served to the recipient by a Web server, but by a file server.
• I don't know how Google Chrome on Android or Safari on an iPhone will react when they access an HTML document on a file space. Will they display it as a website? Or will they download it onto the device as a file without opening it because, again, it is served to them not by a Web server, but by a file server?
• Mobile users dislike opening websites from apps because they dislike their browser popping open. And on Mastodon, much unlike Hubzilla, almost everyone is on a phone and a dedicated app almost all the time.
• This also means that mobile users would have the image and the description in two separate apps. The image in their Mastodon app, the description in their browser.
• I would need much more description.
  Right now, when I have multiple images, my long descriptions consist of a preamble that contains all necessary explanations and, if applicable, visual descriptions of elements that are common to all images. The individual descriptions for each image follow.
  But if I had one image description file per image, then each image description would need the whole preamble included. I can't just add the preamble to the first description file.
  What if someone opens the third description file first? They'll only have a very incomplete description. And linking to the first description file is inconvenient. I would have to know the URL of the first file before completing and uploading the other files because I'd have to include the URL of the first file in them. And the users would have to have three documents open (the image post, the description of the image they're interested in, the description of the first image with the preamble) just to experience one image. Spread across two phone apps.

And that's why I can't put my additional long description in an external document.

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@C. I have two major issues with the Mastodon HOA.

One, they try hard to force "Mastodon standards", Mastodon culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules upon the whole Fediverse. Including places that not only aren't Mastodon, but that are very much not Mastodon. Simply because they can't see where a message is from. In fact, many of them are still fully convinced that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.

And so you have members of the Mastodon HOA yelling at someone who is allegedly "doing Mastodon wrong", but that someone is actually on Friendica and has been since as early as 2011. As in about five years longer than Mastodon has even existed. And seriously, the only places in the Fediverse that are even more different and farther away from Mastodon than Friendica (without specialising in something that Mastodon absolutely can't do) are Friendica's own descendants: Hubzilla, (streams), Forte.

The Mastodon HOA probably don't know that Friendica exists. They definitely don't know that either of the other three exists. They definitely don't know that any of the four is significantly different from Mastodon in any way. And frankly, they don't care a bit. If it appears on any Mastodon timeline, it's Mastodon to them, and it has to adapt to Mastodon's culture and follow Mastodon's rules.

Two, they don't coordinate anything among each other. They're just a bunch of lone wolves. Everyone has got their own standards, but everyone thinks their personal standards are the one and only Mastodon/Fediverse gold standards, and everyone enforces their own standards. And, of course, everyone thinks their standards can and must apply always, including in the most obscure edge-cases.

For example, they've got standards for describing real-life photos on Mastodon with a character limit of 500. And they try to enforce these standards always and everywhere. However, these standards don't necessarily work perfectly when I post a rendering from a super-obscure 3-D virtual world on (streams) with a character limit of over 24 million where I've got loads of room to write an additional long image description and put it into the post text.

The Mastodon HOA, or at least some of their members, appear to be constantly raising their minimum quality requirements for image descriptions. They must be absolutely accurate, and they must be sufficiently detailed that nobody will ever have to ask for a detail description. Oh, and they must explain whatever the audience may not know about the image or the description. (At this point, it's fair to mention that explanations must never go into the alt-text.)

Sure, I can do that. I have done so in the past. But I can't do that within Mastodon's alt-text character limit of 1,500 (Mastodon truncates longer alt-texts from outside). I can do that even less within Misskey's alt-text character limit of only 512 (Misskey and the Forkeys should truncate longer alt-texts, but due to a bug, they delete them entirely instead, giving the impression that you haven't written an alt-text at all). I can only do that in the additional long description in the post text.

If the Mastodon HOA demand I transcribe literally any and all text within the borders of an image, I can do that, too. In fact, I have done so in the past. I can transcribe bits of text verbatim which the Mastodon HOA can't even read. Which the Mastodon HOA couldn't even find in the image because they're so tiny. But there's no way that I can squeeze 20+ individual text transcripts into 1,500 characters of alt-text along with the rest of the visual description, much less into only 512 characters. The text transcripts will have to go into the long description in the post text, whether the Mastodon HOA want or not.

This means that the post will exceed the holy limit of 500 characters by huge magnitudes. This, in turn, means that when I've satisfied one Mastodon HOA member, another one comes and sanctions me for exceeding the holy 500-character limit. That is, chances are it's actually the same Mastodon HOA member.

In other words, if the content of an image is obscure enough and requires enough description, the only winning move when I want to post such an image is to not post it at all.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #MastodonCulture #MastodonHOA

@Pino Carafa Well, my problem is not the alt-text.

I used to limit my alt-texts to 1,500 characters because Mastodon and its forks truncate longer alt-texts at the 1,500-character mark. In the future, I will limit them to 512 characters because Misskey and its forks should truncate them at that mark if they're longer, but instead, they delete them.

But in addition to my alt-texts, I describe my original images once more (= twice altogether). The other description is what I call the "long description", and it goes directly into the post text (as opposed to the alt-text). I don't have a character limit to worry about (over 16.7 million), so I can do what's outright unimaginable from a Mastodon point of view.

It's this long description that's causing trouble.

That is, I wouldn't wonder if the Mastodon HOA were to sanction me for my alt-text not being detailed enough when I limit it to 512 characters. In fact, I wouldn't wonder if they were to sanction me because a 1,500-character alt-text of mine is lacking important elements (descriptions of certain details, transcripts of all text within the borders of the image etc.).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #MastodonHOA

@Pino Carafa An additional advantage of this would be that I could first ask just how detailed a description they need. Like, if they really want me to spend two full days, morning to evening, to write something that'll take their screen reader three hours to read out loud.

The problem, however, is that the virtual worlds that I frequent change a lot. Everything is built by users. A place that I've shown in an image may change mere days or hours after I've been there, so when I go back to take a closer look for a detailed description, it doesn't look like on the image anymore.

Or that place may be gone entirely. For example, I could post some images from an in-world event, from places specifically built for this event. Then, two months later, someone asks for a more detailed description. But I can't write a more detailed description because I can't go back to these places, simply because these places were closed and shut down a few days after I had posted the images.

Lastly, my impression of Mastodon is still that a significant number of users do not want to ask. Whatever information they may need, they expect it all to come with the post immediately. Having to ask for a detail description or for an explanation appears to be about as bad style as having to ask for a description in the first place.

I've literally seen Mastodon toots in which people say that if they don't understand a post or an image in a post, they want an explanation to come with the post.

I've also seen a Mastodon toot in which someone said that it isn't sufficient to just say what's in an image, but you also have to describe what it looks like. Right away. And in my case, this is actually absolutely justified.

It's a catch-22: If I don't describe my images sufficiently, I risk being sanctioned by the Mastodon HOA for not describing my images sufficiently. But if I do, I risk being sanctioned by the Mastodon HOA for exceeding 500 characters in one post.

Oh, and if I chop my image descriptions into tiny chunks of no more than 500 characters, it's disturbing for my own ilk, the users of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, who are used to not having any character limits and everything being in one message, no matter how long it is. Besides, how many Mastodon users are willing to read a thread of 120 or more posts and find that more convenient than one post with 60,000 characters?

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #MastodonHOA

@Mastodon Migration

Basically telling other people how they should be using Mastodon is not cool unless they are violating some instance rule.

As, by the way, is telling Fediverse users who are not on Mastodon to use whatever they use instead like Mastodon users are expected to use Mastodon.

Please don't be a Mastodon HOA enforcer.

Especially since the alt-text police of the Mastodon HOA have much higher alt-text and image description minimum standards than blind or visually-impaired people. And they seem to be raising their standards further and further.

I always try my best to be way ahead of anyone's image description minimum standards, also in order to demonstrate to the Mastodon HOA that I'm not a lazy bum, and that I do try hard to describe my images properly. For my own original images, this means that I have to describe each one of them twice, with a fairly short description in the alt-text and a much longer one in the post itself.

This, however, clashes with the Mastodon HOA, too, because they also enforce Mastodon's default 500-character limit Fediverse-wide by generously blocking everyone whom they catch exceeding it at first strike.

CC: @🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴  (🌈🦄)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #MastodonHOA

@Author-ized L.J. That's the problem: Whatever I do, I'll lose either way.

On the one hand, I feel a great pressure to describe and explain everything in advance. That way, nobody would ever have to ask me to describe a detail or explain something. And nobody, not even the most die-hard Mastodon alt-text activists, could say that I'm careless and that I only do the very bare minimum or not even that. There are people out there who are eager to block everyone who doesn't describe their images enough or lecture them or attack them for being lazy.

The last time I've described an image for Hubzilla, I refused to write detailed descriptions for the images within that image. That would have escalated and cost me weeks to describe them all because I'd also have had to describe dozens of images within these images and even more images within these images. Mind you, someone who travels to the place I've described couldn't actually see what I'd have described because the images in my image themselves have a limited resolution. But I genuinely felt bad for not describing these images.

Besides, if I only described my original images once, namely in the alt-text, and then briefly and concisely, and if someone came and asked me to describe certain elements at greater detail, I couldn't always do that. Sometimes I couldn't go back to the place shown in the image and take a closer look and write a more detailed description because that place simply doesn't exist anymore, or it has been modified, and it doesn't look like the image anymore. The details that I'd have to take a closer look at are gone.

On the other hand, my experience is also that posting more than 500 characters at once reduces my reach on Mastodon tremendously. I think I must have over 700 or 800 followers, but my reach on Mastodon is similar to that of someone with not even a dozen followers. And I don't think that's because what I post is so uninteresting or because of my rather controversial thoughts about the Fediverse, accessibility in the Fediverse, image descriptions etc.

Basically, I can't possibly post images without risking being sanctioned by anyone.

I've briefly considered putting my long descriptions into separate HTML documents and linking to them. In theory, that would reduce the length of my image posts greatly. However, this is entirely untested. I don't know if it'd work at all, i.e. open the HTML document in someone's browser rather than downloading it to their device as a file. I don't know either if a plain HTML document with no style sheet would be accessible to screen reader users.

What I do know, though, is that Mastodon hates external links with a flaming passion. That's also because the vast majority of Mastodon users is always on phones, using dedicated Mastodon apps. They hate their browser popping open when they tap a link all the same. Also, they tend to distrust external links because the linked documents or pages may not be sufficiently accessible.

Everything would be a whole lot easier if there were Fediverse-wide standards for image descriptions that take the requirements of blind or visually-impaired people into consideration as well as Mastodon's unique culture. If these standards were known to everyone both on Mastodon and in the non-Mastodon Fediverse. If everyone from blind or visually-impaired users to neurodivergent users to fully sighted alt-text activists agreed upon these standards all the same. And if these standards covered extreme edge-cases like mine as well. If there was a generally agreed-upon consensus on a whole lot of questions like:

• Is it okay to have to ask for detailed descriptions of certain details in an image that don't matter within the context of the post?
  Or do they have to be described right away if there's a chance that someone might be curious about them? What if nothing specific in the image matters more within the context than everything else?
• Is it okay to have to ask for explanations if you don't understand the topic of an image?
  Or do images about very obscure niche topics have to come with enough explanations for everyone to understand them right away (not counting technical or jargon terms which always have to be either avoided or explained)?
• So there's the rule that all text within an image must be transcribed verbatim. How far does this rule go?
  Let's suppose I have a few dozen individual bits of text within an image. Most or all of them are so small that they're unreadable. Some are so tiny that they're actually invisible at the image's resolution. Still, technically speaking, they're there. And: I can read them. Instead of reading them in the image, I can read them at the source. So I can transcribe them all.
  What is the rule then?
  Do I have to transcribe them although they're unreadable because the rule says all text has to be transcribed?
  Do I have to transcribe them although they're unreadable because not doing so and writing that they're unreadable with no transcript is or may be considered lazy?
  Do I have to transcribe them because they're unreadable, and even fully sighted people need a transcript to know what's written there?
  Mustn't I transcribe them because they don't show themselves as text in the image at the image's resolution (if they actually don't)?
  Mustn't I transcribe them because I must only describe what's visible in the image at the image's resolution to the naked eye?
  Do I have to transcribe them in my special edge-case in spite of the two above lines because this might be my last and only chance to transcribe them, for they may be gone tomorrow, and I would no longer be able to transcribe them if someone asked for a transcript? Or must I remember to keep personal transcripts of all the texts I come across in my images, just in case someone asks for a transcript of a bit of text that no longer exists?
• Must all text transcripts always be in the alt-text as opposed to an extra long image description in the post? Even if I have 20+ individual text transcripts to squeeze into Mastodon's limit of 1,500 characters of Misskey's limit of 512 characters?
  Or is it okay to
  
  • transcribe them in a separate long description in the post text
  • not put these transcripts into the alt-text
  • mention in the alt-text that there is a long image description in the post, that all the texts in the image are transcribed there, and how exactly to find that long image description?
• If any of the above requires a separate long image description because the image description won't fit within the alt-text character limits, is it preferred for the long description to be in a linked document that will open in the browser (given one has the means to write and host such a document, and users on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte do have these means)?
  Or must the long description be where the image is at all costs? Must it be in the post itself for the convenience of app users even if it inflates the post to a hyper-massive length to the inconvenience of Mastodon users?

Unfortunately, this would require some very extensive discussions on Mastodon, involving mostly Mastodon users. But Mastodon isn't fit for this kind of discussion or debate at all.

Worse yet: I've recently found out that none of the things above must be discussed on Mastodon. Ever. You must not discuss that stuff. You must do it. But you must do it right off the bat. For whichever individual definition of "right".

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Transcript #Transcripts #A11y #Accessibility

@Richard Lewis You can really put a whole lot of effort into finding the optimal description for each one of your images. You can sit down and educate yourself by reading through dozens upon dozens of webpages and articles and blog posts about alt-texts and image descriptions. You can spend hours or days or more searching for and reading Mastodon posts, about alt-texts and image descriptions from a Mastodon point of view until you hope you're well-educated enough to know how to optimise your image descriptions for the Fediverse.

You can rack your brains about

• what's important in your image in the context of your post and what isn't
• who will or may be in the audience of your post
• what they know about your post/your images and what they don't
• what they may want to know about your post/your images, regardless of whether that's important in the context or not
• whether they're willing to go find the missing information themselves
• whether they could find the missing information themselves if they tried in the first place, or whether they'd have to depend on asking you
• whether having to ask or search for missing information is okay in the culture of your audience, or whether you're required to supply all that information right away

and optimise each one of your image descriptions according to your findings. You don't want to throw anyone in front of a bus by neglect, now, do you? And you don't want to appear like a lazy bum, right?

You can educate yourself about many rules of describing images. Like, how to properly describe colours. Or to always put explanations into the post text body and never into the alt-text. Or when and why an additional image description in the post text body makes sense. You can abide by them all.

You can hone your skills and fine-tune your image descriptions at least to near-perfection. You can spend hours or days describing one image, composing and writing it completely by hand with absolutely zero AI support.

Nobody will honour it. It feels like nobody really appreciates your effort if nobody even likes/faves your image posts.

I've done all of the above. All the way to describing each image twice over. Not often because it takes me very long to describe one measly image. I haven't posted a single fully original image since mid-2024. But whenever I do, practically nobody cares.

Granted, it doesn't help that the two channels on which I post my images nowadays (if at all), @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet and @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams), barely have any reach. And even if they had, most Mastodon users would be scared away by the summary/CW announcing a post that exceeds 500 characters by huge magnitudes. But my original image posts can't do without a long image description in the post text body, and even my meme posts can't do without an appropriate amount of explanations, so they have to be that long. And it feels like I've just wasted the hours or days that I've invested into researching for and writing image descriptions.

If anything at all, someone from the alt-text police will show up and attack you and call you ableist for not describing your images exactly by their personal standards. In fact, you can be called ableist by talking about image descriptions instead of just simply delivering perfect image descriptions right off the bat. By whichever definition of "perfect". But don't you dare deviate from it even only a smidge, for that'd be ableist.

Although, seriously, people getting together and talking about image descriptions and alt-texts and finding a consensus and common definitions for good alt-texts and image descriptions for the whole Fediverse is what we so direly need. But not even the alt-text police coordinate their image description quality standards, nor do they communicate them. You have to know them just like so.

What makes matters worse is that if your alt-text exceeds 512 characters, Misskey will discard it entirely, and accessibility activists on Misskey will think you're too lazy to write an alt-text. This may apply to the various Forkeys as well.

You can't possibly write perfect image descriptions for everyone. But you have to write perfect image descriptions for everyone because everyone demands you write perfect image descriptions for them personally. Or else!

CC: @Nervensäge 💐 @jeSuisatire  neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AltTextPolice #A11y #Accessibility #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@Victor You will still lose lots of reach.

People won't see your image posts because they have technical means of hiding or completely removing any and all posts with images without alt-text from all their timelines.

People will block you upon first strike when finding one of your image posts without an alt-text.

Followers will unfollow you.

You will be lectured. You will be scolded. You will be verbally attacked. You will be called an ableist swine. Even more so if you try to defend yourself.

If you want at least some reach on Mastodon, and if you want to be left in peace, your only choice is to add a hand-written, non-AI-generated, accurate, sufficiently detailed alt-text to every single last image that you will ever post. Immediately when posting it.

CC: @🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴  (🌈🦄)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

@🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 In general, when it comes to what to include in an image description, the context matters. But so does the target audience (not as in whom you want to receive your content, but who may stumble upon it this or that way), and so does the existing knowledge of the target audience. And, this is pretty much Fediverse-specific, so do the expectations of your target audience.

I've observed and studied alt-text and image descriptions for some three years now, not only by reading dozens upon dozens of guides all over the Web, but especially by examining the attitude towards it in the Fediverse, that is, actually only on Mastodon because alt-text isn't such a hot topic anywhere else. I've mostly done so in order to up my own image-describing game further and further and further, also because no alt-text guide out there covers my situation, so I had to cobble all that information together myself, enough information for me to have started my own wiki on this topic to share my knowledge with others.

One thing I've noticed is that Mastodon loves long and extensive image descriptions in alt-text. There's no "keep it short and concise"; instead, there are users who keep receiving praise for alt-texts of 800 or 1,000 characters or more.

Also, my impression is that Mastodon does not like having to ask for details and/or explanations, nor does it like to look up what it doesn't know enough about to understand it. If you have to ask someone who has posted an image for a description of a certain detail in an image, this means that the image description is lacking, regardless of whether or not that detail matters within the context of the post. Having to ask for a description of a detail is almost as bad as having to ask for the description of the whole image.

In fact, it was just a few months ago that I read a Mastodon toot that said that any element in an image mentioned in the description must also have its own visual description. You can't just say what's in the image. You also have to describe what it looks like.

Likewise, if there's something in an image description that someone doesn't understand, it must be explained right away. This, by the way, ties in with the rule that image descriptions must never use technical language or jargon, and if they absolutely cannot avoid it, it must be explained when it's used first. And it must be explained in a way that requires no prior special knowledge.

So far, so good. But the reason why I've gone all the way to observe and study alt-text and image descriptions, and why I'm so obsessed with it, is because I'm in a special situation.

For one, I'm in the Fediverse which means that certain alt-text rules simply don't apply to me, not only everything that involves captions, but also the brevity-as-a-hard-requirement rule. However, I'm not on Mastodon, so I'm not as much bound to Mastodon's limitations as Mastodon users. In particular, my character limit is over 16 million, so I can do a whole lot more in the post itself.

Besides, my original images are nothing like what almost everyone on Mastodon posts. They aren't real-life photographs, nor are they social media screenshots. Instead, they are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds, even extremely obscure virtual worlds that next to nobody out there has ever even heard of.

At the same time, my image posts might get people curious enough that they want to go explore this new universe that they've just discovered through my post. The only way they can explore it is by looking at my images and taking in all the big and small details. If they're blind, they cannot do that, but accessibility and inclusion demand they have the very same chance to do it as fully sighted people. In order for them to have this chance, I must go and describe all these big and small details to them, regardless of context. Everything else would be ableist, maybe not by some official W3C definition, but at least by Mastodon's definition.

Speaking of context, sometimes my images are the context of the post. There isn't that one element in the image that matters within the context of the post while everything else can be swept under the rug. No, the entire image matters. The entire scenery matters. Everything in the image matters all the same. This means that I have to describe everything. Again, see further above: I can't get away with just mentioning what's there. If I mention it, I have to describe what it looks like.

This is also justified because I can never expect everyone to already know what something in my image looks like. Again, they don't show real life. They show virtual worlds. In virtual worlds, things do not necessarily look like what they look like in real life. And things tend to look different in different virtual worlds, sometimes even within the same virtual world system.

For example, you, as someone born completely blind, may have come across enough image descriptions to have a rough idea of what cats look like in real life. But that does not automatically give you a realistic idea what a particular cat looks like in a specific virtual world, also seeing as there are infinitely more possibilities for what cats may look like. It could be a detailed, life-like representation of a cat with high-resolution materials as textures. It could be a very simplified, low-resolution model with a likewise low-resolution texture. It could be cobbled together from standard shapes because that was all that was possible when that cat was made. Or whatever. You wouldn't know unless I told you. But who am I to judge whether or not you want to know?

It gets even worse with buildings. You probably wouldn't even know what a specific building looks like in real life unless you have a detailed description, so how are you supposed to know what a specific building looks like in a virtual world that you've first read about a few minutes ago? In addition, there are so many ways of creating buildings in virtual worlds, and they've changed over time with new tools and new features becoming available.

I've come to a point at which I usually avoid having buildings in my images because they're too tedious to describe, especially realistic buildings, but not only these. My last original image post but one was in spring, 2024, about one and a half years ago. I decided to show a rather fantasy-like building. This building, however, is so complex that it took me two full days, morning to evening, to write the long image description that I'd put into the post. This image description is over 60,000 characters long, over 40,000 of which describe the building. The description also covers the interior because the outer walls of the building are almost entirely glass. The long description has two levels of headlines of its own. I've needed well over 4,000 characters only to explain to people where that place is that's shown in the image.

And then there was the short description for the alt-text which I needed as well so that nobody could accuse me of not adding a sufficiently detailed alt-text to my image. I was genuinely unable to make it any shorter than 1,400 characters. It actually took up a lot of characters that I needed to point especially Mastodon users at the long description in the post itself. That was when Mastodon only hid the post text behind a CW, but not the images, so that nobody on Mastodon would have known that there's a long description unless I told them in the alt-text.

One reason why the long description grew so long was that I didn't describe the image by looking at the image. I described it by looking at the real deal. All the time while I was working on the long description, I was in-world. I had my avatar in front of the building, walking through the building, walking around the building. I could move the camera very close to a lot of details. Instead of seeing the scenery at the resolution of the image, I saw it at a practically infinite resolution. This also enabled me to transcribe text that's so small in the image that it's unreadable, even text that's so tiny in the image that it's invisible. After all, the rule says that any and all text within the borders of an image must be transcribed. And I've yet to see that rule having any explicit exception for unreadable text.

Sure, I could have written that certain details got lost and cannot be identified at the low resolution of the image. But that may be perceived as me trying to weasel out of the responsibility to describe these details instead. I mean, how many people who were born completely blind have a concept of image resolution and pixels, and how many think that it's possible to zoom into any image infinitely? Besides, I'm not bound to what the image shows at its fairly low resolution anyway, so why should I pretend I am? The only logical reason for that would be because I'm expected to describe the image. And not the scenery in the area within the borders of the image.

And still, I haven't given full visual descriptions of everything in that scene. I decided against fully describing all images within that image at the same level as the image itself. I decided so because it would have gone too far: At least one image, a preview image on a teleporter, technically shows dozens of images itself, preview images on teleporters again. And some of these images show more images yet again. I would have ended up describing several dozens of images, at least four levels deep, in order to fully describe one image. And then the whole image description would have been rather pointless because Mastodon rejects posts with over 100,000 characters, and the post would probably have ended up with several millions of characters.

By the way, even before I wrote that massive image description, I actually showed @Hat.  AuDHD cat 😷n95🍉 💔🌻🔻 one of my image posts, the one with my longest description for a single image to that date. It has two images with over 48,000 characters of long description combined, almost 40,000 of which are for the first image. She actually praised this massive image description and told me that this level of detail in both visual description and explanation is exactly what she needs.

The last time I've posted original in-world images was in July, 2024. I took care not to have too many details in the images this time. Still, I ended up with a combined over 25,000 characters of long description for both images, also because they contain an avatar that had to be described in full detail.

I've been working on the image descriptions for a series of avatar portraits for about a year now, on and off, but still. This time, I gave the images a neutral, completely feature-less, bright white background that won't take up much effort to describe. The plan is to have three or four images with three or four portraits of the same avatar each, always in the same post with only slightly different outfits. I'm still describing the first image, and I've only fully covered the first outfit and started with the second one.

The common preamble for all images in one post already exceeds 17,000 characters, including over 2,000 characters explaining OpenSim and over 9,000 characters explaining what OpenSim avatars can be made of and how they work because that's essential for understanding the visual descriptions. I expect the preamble to grow significantly longer before it's ready because I have to get rid of a whole lot of technical language and jargon and/or explain even more of it. The preamble also contains over 5,000 characters of general visual description that applies to all portraits in all images the same. It includes almost 2,000 characters that describe the shoes, men's casual leather shoes, because to my best knowledge, such shoes don't exist in real life.

Other images will show the avatar wearing full brogue leather shoes. I'm still not sure whether I can correctly assume that everyone out there knows what they are and what they look like, or whether I'll have to give the same amount of detail description again, only that full brogue shoes are much more complex than the shoes I've already described. Also, I'm not sure if everyone out there knows what a herringbone fabric pattern looks like, or whether that requires a detail description and an explanation itself, even though several actually blind users have told me that I can assume it to be familiar.

One problem I still haven't solved is that I simply can't fit an appropriately detailed short image description into a maximum of 1,500 characters of alt-text.

Verdict: There are always edge cases in which an image cannot be sufficiently described in only one short and concise image description in the alt-text. My virtual world renderings are such an edge case, also because they're posted into the Fediverse. Another edge case is @Hat.  AuDHD cat 😷n95🍉 💔🌻🔻 who, due to a disability, requires hyper-detailed image descriptions that take hours to read to even be able to experience and understand an image properly.

CC: @Carolyn @Prof. Rachel Thorn 🍉🇺🇦🏳️‍⚧️🏳️

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta #VirtualWorlds