Alt-text requirements as they're enforced in the Fediverse vs how I describe images; CW: long (over 8,600 characters)
I'm still struggling with #
ImageDescriptions. Notice how I didn't say I'm struggling with #
AltText. That's because my typical #
ImageDescription doesn't fit into alt-text anymore. Not on Mastodon, MissKey, Firefish and other places which have 1,500-character limits and hardly or not at all anywhere else that doesn't have a limit.
Let's take a look at the situation in the #
Fediverse right now first.
Many Fediverse users, especially on Mastodon, refuse to boost posts with images without alt-text. Others remind users who don't provide alt-text to do so whenever they can. Others yet again call users out who don't provide alt-text and lecture them in good Fediverse manners in a quite rude and condescending way.
As of this summer, this no longer only happens when there's no alt-text at all. It also happens when the alt-text doesn't describe the image in a sufficiently informative way. A picture with a pie chart an no alt-text is bad. And now, a picture with a pie chart and an alt-text that only mentions that there's a pie chart in the picture is just as bad and deserves the same treatment.
I expect the threshold for what's sufficiently informative to rise further. #
Transcription of text may actually become mandatory. It kind of is already now, but currently, many Fediverse users still get away with not transcribing every bit of text in their pictures. I wouldn't be too surprised if that changed. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if people were being called out for leaving bits of text in their pictures untranscribed.
I myself am trying to be way ahead of this. I'm trying to write image descriptions that are as informative as I deem necessary for the people who find my posts in their timelines. If there's something in my pictures of which I can assume that these people are unfamiliar with, I describe it, and I explain it if necessary. Since I take all my pictures in places which are completely unknown to just about everybody with stuff in them that's completely unknown to just about everybody, I have to describe a whole lot. In fact, I have to describe literally everything. Instead of just describing a picture, I practically re-make it in words.
If there's text in the picture, I transcribe it. If there's text in the scenery shown in the picture, and the text itself or whatever the text is on is visible from the picture's point of view, I transcribe it even if it's impossible to read in the picture itself. It may be too small to read. It may be so tiny that you can't even see it, at least not as text. It may be obscured by something. I still transcribe it. I just need access to a legible source, and be it by going back in-world and reading the text there. In fact, while some may say that only legible text should be transcribed, I see nobody being able to read a piece of text at all as one more reason to transcribe it.
For those who often wait in vain for images to load on their phones due to a poor mobile connection, I guess this has to be a bliss. #
Blind or #
VisuallyImpaired users might enjoy the level of #
accessibility that comes with being able to experience a picture in the same way as a sighted person.
Last week, I've reached the point at which my image descriptions grew too long for alt-text. The most frequently recommended solution for this was to put the image description into the same post itself.
Still, no matter how detailed they are, I eventually catch myself still finding them lacking. I should have written that the picture is a digital rendering. I should have described this or that in more detail. Maybe I should actually have spent another hour researching what's on that texture that makes up the display of a virtual model of a laptop, what those applications are that are open, maybe I should have transcribed the labels on the start menu entries. And I'm talking about a laptop that's tiny in the picture, that's half-obscured, that nobody would even notice if I didn't mention it's in the picture, that still nobody would be able to find because I haven't described where exactly it is in the picture. And so forth.
When I wrote
this post three months ago, I was rather satisfied with what I thought were sufficiently-detailed image descriptions. Today, I think they're far from sufficient. If I were to write the same post with the same pictures today, it'd probably take me several days to write it from describing the few avatars and the many static figures to identifying over 150 album covers, and the three image descriptions would push the post well beyond the 40,000-character mark. At least I might think I could get away with counting album covers as familiar enough to not have to describe and transcribe them all, one by one.
Taking pictures at virtual-world parties and posting them with sufficient image descriptions before the party ends can be a challenge that doesn't leave you enough time to enjoy the party beyond the music stream because you're so busy describing a picture and zooming around in-world to identify what's in the picture. Or it can be out-right impossible because the party is over before you're done writing. The latter is the more likely, the more pictures you have.
Currently, my image descriptions stay largely unnoticed. But I wonder what might happen in the near future, should a few more people discover them. I can see five unpleasant things happen.
One, people calling me out for not having a sufficient description of the image in the alt-text. There's a several-thousand-word wall of text that describes the image in all its details in the post, but these people may insist in there being a sufficiently informative description in the alt-text, full stop. The alternative would be blind or visually-impaired screen reader users calling me out for giving two descriptions of the same image in the same post.
Two, people calling me out for one of my image descriptions being too long. That might be unlikely to happen. I've seen a lot of alt-texts on real-world photographs with quite detailed image descriptions that show on Mastodon's default Web interface as eight or nine or ten or eleven or more lines or that even approach Mastodon's character limit. Nobody is being called out for providing these. If anything, these long and detailed descriptions may receive positive reactions or even the hashtag #
AltTextAward in a comment (I haven't actually received it, and I don't really expect it either). But I can't fully rule out that I've reached and gone beyond the point of
too much description. The alternative would be to leave things unclear and unidentifyable for most people who may come across my pictures.
Three, people calling me out because my five-digit-character-count image description still lacks information, because it still doesn't describe this or that sufficiently and leaves unclear what it is and what it looks like, or because it mentions something they aren't familiar with and describes what it looks like, but it doesn't explain it.
Four, people calling me out for not issuing a content warning because the image description has revealed a tiny blot of four pixels to be something sensitive. And now these people feel offended or triggered by four pixels.
And five, my style of image description becoming the new benchmark in the Fediverse, or at least more and more people believing it is the benchmark. Especially new users may start believing that an image description absolutely has to amount to "painting with words", no matter what the image actually shows. Then they spend hours describing a real-life photograph of their dog, fully transcribing the frontpage of a magazine that happens to be lying on a table in the background and listing all the books in the bookshelf way back with title and author, top to bottom, left to right.
I seriously can't completely rule that out. I've recently received
praise for
an over-3,000-characters-long description of a rather simple image, and that's far from being my longest image description. Still, I don't want to be responsible for Mastodon users feeling obliged to pump hours into writing image descriptions and cut them up into small chunks to post them as long threads. I mean, the majority of Mastodon users is on phones with no hardware keyboards.
Just so much: My way of writing image descriptions is probably not always appropriate. Real-world photographs don't need as detailed descriptions and as many as extensive explanations as similar pictures from #
VirtualWorlds which nobody is familiar with.
