Mastodon culture will declare alt-texts for profile pictures mandatory Fediverse-wide, but most Fediverse software doesn't even support them; CW: long (over 3,500 characters), Fediverse meta, alt-text meta, image description meta
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So there's a new attack vector for Mastodon users against non-Mastodon users in the making.
Mastodon is rolling out alt-texts for what we on Hubzilla call the profile photo and the cover photo. It won't be long until it becomes mandatory in Mastodon's culture to have alt-texts for both these pictures. Regardless of how new this feature is and how many other features that were introduced between March, 2022 and now have not made it into Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's unwritten rules, by the way.
At this point, Mastodon's alt-text activists will start attacking
anyone and everyone whom they catch without alt-texts for these two pictures. At least they'll lecture them about the importance of alt-texts. Or they'll block them outright.
What they won't realise:
- Not everyone in the Fediverse is on Mastodon. Just because you see something on your Mastodon Web UI or in your Mastodon app, doesn't mean it's on or from Mastodon itself.
- In fact, that particular user might not be on Mastodon.
- Just because Mastodon rolls out a new feature, doesn't mean everything in the Fediverse rolls out the same feature at the same time. This means that there's a whole lot of Fediverse server software that does not offer alt-texts for profile pictures, and that probably won't offer them for quite a while or ever.
- Also, Mastodon's culture is not and will never be the culture of the whole Fediverse. Sorry, Mastodon fundamentalists, but some software has been here before Mastodon, its culture is older than Mastodon itself, and it's technologically incompatible with Mastodon's unwritten rules.
Here on Hubzilla, where I'm posting from right now (in case you really thought I'm on Mastodon just like you), there is no such thing as a dedicated field for alt-texts
anywhere. Even if you want to post pictures, there is no alt-text entry mask, and there is no alt-text database field for the images.
Instead, both images and alt-texts are handled like on a blog: You embed the image somewhere in the post text using markup code. In a sense, you
program the image into the post. And if you want the image to have alt-text, you have to
program the alt-text into the image-embedding code. If you're afraid of coding, Hubzilla is not for you.
But if there's no entry mask and no database field for alt-texts in posts, there won't be either for the profile images either. That is, unless Hubzilla adopts the alt-text field from (streams) and Forte where alt-texts can be added to uploaded images in the Photo app so that they're automatically inserted whenever you embed an image in a message. Using that alt-text field for profile images should be trivial then.
If you want or need the images in my profile described: I don't have a description for my profile photo. For my cover photo, I actually have
two. They're both in this post:
https://hub.hubzilla.de/display/c796febd-8ce2-472b-a46b-23fdf6b16f18. One is in the alt-text which you probably can't open when you're on a phone; the alt-text is 1,500 characters long, a bit over 1,400 of which are visual description. The other one is in the post text itself. But you'd better have a lot of time at your hand because it's over 60,000 characters long, and it'll probably take you a few hours to read it.
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