 Finally added a #Hometown feature I have wanted for a long time. Media in a timeline that lacks alt text now has a little warning icon in the lower left (shown here with mouseover text). This is a quick signal to help people (like me) who do not boost media without alt text. It also makes images that don't have alt text... slightly uglier heheheh :AngelDevil: 33 comments
 @darius Mostly I like this. But sometimes I don't include alt text because the image is described in the toot itself. @WearsHats That's fine. The icon is just there to say there is no alt text, which is true even if you describe the image in the post itself. A human looking at it, like me, would go "oh it has a description, I'll boost it anyway" @WearsHats yup. In general it is a good idea to include the alt text, even compared to describing in the post itself, and I feel fine minorly penalizing images for lacking it. Will probably change the mouseover text to say "No descriptive text" rather than "No alt text", since that is more technically correct and more consistent with how Mastodon refers to the feature anyway Okay, I have made a pull request for my "media lacks description" feature on Mastodon. We'll see how it goes! Also if you want to see an example of what I consider an acceptably detailed pull request for a user-facing feature... check it out.
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 @FiXato oh yeah thanks for pointing out that edge case. I think I want to avoid that for now but I'll make an issue to consider it in a future Hometown release @FiXato issue you can track if you like: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/issues/1263  @darius neat! i wonder if a good companion feature to this is community sourced alt text. not sure how to prevent abuse against something like that tho ๐ค  @axwax This issue I have filed will address that by adding visible and copyable alt text to the lightbox image you get when you click to focus.  @darius Take a look at the current UI for image uploading. It says โNo description addedโ, but the text is light gray and can hardly be seen on many images. Put the text below the image or give that link a background-color. Alsoโfor someone *not* initiatedโwhy would an image need a โdescriptionโ? How would they understand that this helps those visually impaired? Something along the lines of โNeeds a description for the visually impairedโ (a better English speaker, not me, should write that). ๐   @darius Very cool! Would like to see the platform scan the image file for a comment/description to use as alt text. This means the user adds it to the image once, rather than every time they want to post the picture somewhere. Also would love to have the platform save any added alt text in the image file, instead of simply wiping all metadata. Descriptive text should travel with the image. @mlibby this is more of an issue with images themselves at the moment. Some of the different popular image formats (like PNG) allow for metadata but there is no standardization across formats. So even if it wrote descriptive metadata no other software would know how to use it. Completely agree that images should function as you describe but that's a massive standardization problem that I think would take years of coordination across many organizations.  @darius I really, really like this. I was thinking along the same lines, so I could avoid boosting images without descriptions. |
Gregory's Server
@darius What amazes me here is this is the opposite of the current Twitter behavior, which punishes you for putting alt text in an image by defacing it with a small tag