Why I'll keep putting my long image descriptions into my posts rather than into external documents; CW: long (almost 3,000 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse beyond Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta
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I've just come to the realisation that putting long descriptions into external documents in the file space of my Hubzilla channel and then linking to them is a dumb idea. It's especially so for the use-case for which it was considered for, and that's posts with multiple embedded images.
It's untested. It's experimental. It might not even work for all I know. It's inconvenient for mobile users because their browser will pop up when they tap the link to the long image description in their Mastodon apps. That is, if it works they way I intend it to work. Which, again, I'm not sure about.
But most of all, it creates too much redundancy.
If I put all my long image descriptions into separate documents, then everything that's in all images likewise will have to be described in all its details once for each image. And all explanations that usually come with my long image descriptions will have to be there once for each image. If I have four images, I need four times the same explanation of way over 1,000 characters where the images were made even though they were all made in the very same place.
That's because I can't expect everyone to open and read all long descriptions. In fact, I can't count on everyone opening and reading
the first long description. Thus, I can't explain everything only in the first long description. If someone only opens the second or third or fourth long description, they'll be missing a whole lot of explanation because it's only in the first description.
Sure, I could tell people where the explanations are. But that'd mean that the alt-text for the fourth image would tell them about the long description for the fourth image, but the long description for the fourth image would be very incomplete and refer people to the long descriptions of the first three images. Having to read five descriptions in five separate places in two apps for one image is even more cumbersome than having to read two descriptions in two different places in two apps for one image.
On the other hand, if I put all my long image descriptions into the post itself like I've always done since I've started taking image descriptions seriously, they wouldn't be right below the images proper in a post with multiple images embedded in-between text. But they'd be in the very same place as the images.
More importantly, they'd all be in the same place, full stop. I could do as I've always done recently. I could start with a common preamble for all four image descriptions in which I explain common stuff, and in which I even describe common stuff. And then I could let the specific descriptions for the individual images follow. Each bit of information would be there only once in one place and not four times over in four separate places.
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