Six assumptions which influence the way I describe my images; CW: long (almost 5,700 characters), Fediverse meta, alt-text meta, image description, ableism meta
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When I describe my images, I do so under a few assumptions.
One: My audience is not limited to my following contacts. It's absolutely everyone who comes across any of my posts.It isn't sufficient to make my posts accessible to those who have chosen to follow me. I must make them just as accessible to a random stranger who receives them after they've been boosted a dozen times over. I must make them just as accessible to a random stranger who stumbles upon them on the public timeline of whatever server they're on.
Two: If an element in an image is mentioned, it must also be described visually.Blind or visually-impaired people always need to know what something in my images looks like. This goes doubly for my typical original images; I mean, how are they supposed to know what something looks like
in a specific 3-D virtual world?
So if there's a building in one of my images, and I mention that this building is there, I also have to give a visual description of it. A full, detailed description.
If there's an image in one of my images, e.g. a preview image on a teleporter that shows the place where the teleporter would take me, I have to fully describe that image. An image in my image that doesn't even take up 200 pixels in my image. (Something that I've refused to do in my longest image description so far because that would have led me to going at least four levels deep: describing loads of infinitely small images in several dozen infinitely small images in an image in my image.)
In fact, this isn't an assumption. I have written confirmation for it. I can't find it right now, otherwise I'd share it here, but I have it somewhere.
Three: Image descriptions must always deliver all information that someone may need right away.Not everyone wants to ask for a description of a certain detail in an image. Not everyone wants to ask for an explanation of what they don't understand or what they're unfamiliar with. Having to look things up yourself isn't much better. Some may go as far as likening not having an image description that contains everything they need to know to not having
any image description.
By the way: It's a fact that some Mastodon users consider linking to external information ableist because linked websites aren't necessarily sufficiently accessible themselves. Instead of linking to information, the information must go into the post itself. (And I can't even use any character limit as an excuse not to do that because my "limit" is over 16.7 million.)
In other words, the only way for me not to be ableist is to give any and all information that anyone out there may require in my image post immediately.
Of course, this will clash with the demand by other Mastodon users (or maybe even some of the same) to never post more than 500 characters at once. But I can't do both. And I've never read anywhere that posting more than 500 characters is allegedly ableist.
Four: Someone somewhere out there may be interested in even small details in my image. And they may not be sighted.Maybe you aren't. But someone somewhere out there may be. And they matter every bit as much as you or everyone else.
If they need a full description of all details, regardless of why, I have to deliver it. Immediately. See above.
Five: Any and all text within the borders of the image must be transcribed verbatim, no exception.Most importantly,
this even extends to text that's unreadable in the image if I can read and/or source it.The assumptions further up apply here as well: If I mention it (the text in this case, and be it as part of the visual description of something else like a teleporter), then I must describe (as in transcribe) it. And someone somewhere out there may be interested in it.
If this means that I have to transcribe not one or two, but 20, 30, 40 bits of text in one image, then so be it, so are the rules.
Just because nobody on Mastodon does it, doesn't mean they're doing it right, and I'm doing it wrong. Maybe they don't know what that unreadable text says. Maybe they don't know that someone wants to know what's written there.
Six: All images must have an accurate and sufficiently detailed proper alt-text.I can spend two days, morning to evening, working on an image description of 60,000 characters. 10,000 words. Three hours worth of reading. I can put the whole thing into the same post as the image. As in the post text body. As opposed to the alt-text for which this description is way too long.
But if the image in the post doesn't have an actual alt-text (and, again, it doesn't because the image description is in the post text itself), Mastodon's alt-text police is likely and fully justified to sanction me regardless.
So no matter how long and detailed and well-researched the long image description in the post is, I still have to distill an additional, shorter image description for the alt-text from it. And I have to do so without cutting too much information. Ideally, without cutting any information. If any of my images need a long description in the post, they need two descriptions, the long one in the post, the shorter one in the alt-text.
Leaving the several dozen individual text transcripts out of the description for the alt-text is risky already because
text transcripts belong into the alt-text.
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