@dgar Great examples! I also read on here that you don't have to say "a photo of" or "a gif of" because alt readers already say what kind of attachment it is.

The alt text area is a place to explain the point you make with the photo. And to hide an easter egg 😜

@dgar #AltText is where my BA in English intersects with my nature photography. I might sometimes be guilty of the overkill you describe, but I enjoy describing the object of my photo (bird, plant, etc.) and the foreground and background.

Interestingly, now that you call my attention to it I realize I do this more for my own photos than for other images I share. Whatever that means.

@dgar

@georgetakei you might like this thread 😊

@dgar As one of the many blind people that follow you, thank you. It makes my heart sing to know there are people out there commited to making this place more inclusive.

@dgar
I've sort of gone the other way, the context of what is pictured is always in the post, so I've been trying to just accurately describe the picture in case there is context or interest that I don't see.

I have been describing a lot of kites lately. Sometimes I feel foolish saying "a small red kite on a blue, partly cloudy, sky", but a lot of people with vision issues were not blind from birth, so maybe they want to know that the kite is red?

@dgar To use my recent experience as a sighted person, imagine your instance administrator accidentally let the SSL certificate expire for the media server but you're still scrolling mastodon and are too lazy to click through to load the media from the original server on every toot :)

@dgar love it

@dgar 1 ...

For a few days now I am contemplating a toot about this topic.

I usually take the effort to describe in detail what is in a photo. Once on the Bluebird site I read a tweet from a blind person who asked for better descriptions in #AltTexts and explained also what screen readers are capable of and what not - for example, if there are only emojis in the handle/nickname of the tweeter, the screen reader cannot say what it means.

... 2

@dgar 2 ...

Since then, I changed my name handle to only letters (no special signs, no earth pictograph) and payed extra attention to what I attached to my tweets. And, I am imagining what I would like to know about a picture, if I couldn't see it. Or, try to explain it to a friend on the phone (landline, no video possible).

What is very sad is, when people just put their text from the toot above into the #AltText and think that would be enough. No. It is not.