I'm seeing a lot of proclamations that there should be no exceptions to describing your images or that there's no reason to interact with any that aren't described.
I know these mean well, but they are themselves ableist.
Disabled people know that access needs can clash. I benefit from described images, but I know some people struggle to write them because of their own disabilities.
And that's okay! The culture of image descriptions is great here but it should never be absolutist.
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Erik
in reply to Erik • • •I challenged someone on their hardline stance on this once, and it blew up into a tiny fedi drama, with the nice outcome of more social solutions.
That's around the time people started to CW undescribed images.
My instance developed an emoji
to indicate you'd like a media description added.
There's a group you can tag, @imagecaptionspls, that people follow who are willing to add descriptions.
And there's @PleaseCaption to remind you if you forget.
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Erik
in reply to Erik • • •Please describe:
* your jokes/memes - it's no good saying "this is just silly, you're not missing anything"; let us be the judge of that! Also, being disabled isn't about being dull and worthy all the time.
* your artwork - I'm so sad when I see cool art I can't boost (and sometimes can't even discern :) )
* your gifs and videos - description isn't just for still images!
* your audio clips - yep, these can be described too!
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Sebastian Lasse
in reply to Erik • • •about “describing your images”:
In the ActivityPub forum, there is also a thread about writing a formal Fediverse Enhancement Proposal.
This goes then to all the implementors, developers, writers of ActivityPub software.
weex started it there and said:
“When media such as images and video are uploaded and shared without captions, it excludes the visually impaired from knowing what the content is.
To address this, some user interfaces highlight such media so that people can be more easily made aware of this deficiency in what they may share. People can then reply to ask for a captioned repost, or decide whether they want to share or otherwise engage with such content.”
I have added this thread there too, the Link is socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…
/ @aral
Would Media captioning make a good FEP?
SocialHubalternative_be✅🖖🏻
in reply to Sebastian Lasse • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to alternative_be✅🖖🏻 • • •alternative_be✅🖖🏻
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
in reply to alternative_be✅🖖🏻 • • •clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 likes this.
Rockario
in reply to Erik • • •Erik
in reply to Rockario • • •Off On One
in reply to Erik • • •Erik
in reply to Off On One • • •:pine: the ☀️ & the 🌑 (@t54r4n1@mspsocial.net)
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Off On One
in reply to Erik • • •Erik
in reply to Erik • • •Since I first wrote this, a good cultural norm that has found its way to fedi is the hashtags Alt4Me (where you can ask for an image description) and Alt4You (where you can add one to a toot that lacks it).
Also, most instances have edit functionality now, which makes it really easy to add the image description back into your toot if someone adds one for you!
2,000 trained rats :ace:
in reply to Erik • • •Erik
in reply to 2,000 trained rats :ace: • • •Oh is that not a mainline thing? Heck. My instance uses Hometown and I can't keep track of what is a feature of what.
Back before editing image descriptions was possible, though, the received wisdom seemed to be that if you removed and then re-uploaded the photo, you could add the description then. That still doesn't seem overly difficult, as general advice goes.
clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
in reply to Erik • • •@brave paws, in cuddle format 🩼 @Nonbinary But Has a Wife :ace: Caption editing is on mainline since Feb 2023.
github.com/mastodon/mastodon/r…
Fish Id Wardrobe
in reply to Erik • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to Fish Id Wardrobe • • •Sabrina Web likes this.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Aral Balkan • •silver
in reply to Erik • • •great and true post, the overall fediverse push to caption images is great and really should be done a lot more across the web... and yeah as someone who struggles sometimes to have energy to write captions sometimes my images have to go uncaptioned for a bit until i have more energy
only wanted to add also that having read the official web standards, alt text (afaik) can also be left blank if the image has contextual text next to it that would render alt text redundant
Toffee
in reply to silver • • •clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 likes this.
Erik
in reply to Toffee • • •clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
in reply to Erik • • •