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Florian

Alt text will absolutely still be required on websites and social media posts; this is just to patch over where people couldn't be bothered to be inclusive, basically :)

5 comments
Inara :therian:

@zersiax or are unable to use english to describe things and can easily get overwelmed by it and cause the vessel freeze up and space out like me

Florian

@Kazhumazu or that :) fortunately there's usually hashtags to request others to do this for you if you do run into that issue, web is harder, but using an AI you might be able to have it generate the alt and then edit as needed. I'm cognisant of your struggles, I really am, but as a member of an audience for whom the difference between being included in a conversation or not depends on alt text being there or not I also have to be somewhat firm there. There is ways, people just refuse to use them en masse and unfortunately yank people like yourself who just have a lot of trouble with it into the crossfire and I'm truly sorry about that :( I appreciate you responding!

@Kazhumazu or that :) fortunately there's usually hashtags to request others to do this for you if you do run into that issue, web is harder, but using an AI you might be able to have it generate the alt and then edit as needed. I'm cognisant of your struggles, I really am, but as a member of an audience for whom the difference between being included in a conversation or not depends on alt text being there or not I also have to be somewhat firm there. There is ways, people just refuse to use them...

james

@zersiax but do we really want to give some who can’t be bothered, a check box that generates confusing, shallow and often innacurate alt text that would be more aggravating than not having any alt text at all?

This is not an “ai sucks” comment with not foundation. Artists have been using AI alt text on Instagram for a while now and it is truly awful.

Florian

@james I don't know, honestly :) I think it depends on the image.
Chrome and Edge have had this feature for a while now, sans LLM, and really the only time that is useful is when there's text in an image, which gets OCR'ed ...relatively ... well. So in that sense I can see it; PDFs often are pictures of text and this might bridge that divide. For practically any other purpose though ...no, probably not :)

james

@zersiax mastodon web and some Fediverse clients like Ivory already have that OCR, yet I still see tonnes of image posts of text that do not bother to use it.

Which is why I’m like “please don’t just launch this and expect people to check what comes out, otherwise you’ve just made experience a special sort of crap”

😬

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