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Jupiter Rowland
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(Follow-up to this post [hub.netzgemeinde.eu])

Professional Web designers would probably shake their heads at the atrocity that's a full-blown #ImageDescription in #AltText. Detailed #ImageDescriptions do not even belong into alt-text. The only reason why they're in alt-text on #Mastodon is because alt-text has enough room for them, and toots themselves don't. And the only reason why they're in alt-text elsewhere in the #Fediverse is because someone has learned all they know about alt-text and image descriptions from Mastodon. I'll get back to that.

Another issue with alt-text is that there are people who cannot access it. Some mobile apps have no way of displaying alt-text. Desktop Web browsers based on Chromium are lacking in this department, too, as far as I've read; I'm a Firefox user myself.

And there are Fediverse users with physical disabilities that render them incapable of, for example, hovering a mouse cursor over an image to access its alt-text. Others may still use older #ScreenReaders that can't handle alt-text longer than 200 characters. Or if their screen readers are newer, they can only rattle down alt-text in one go, but they can't, for example, go back to some specific point in the alt-text. In this regard, image descriptions in alt-text are the opposite of #accessibility, long and detailed ones even more so.

These Fediverse users, as well as professional Web designers, say that detailed image descriptions belong into the text body.

Now, all you Mastodon users who read this may say that this is just plain impossible with that 500-character limit. It's impossible on Mastodon because Mastodon is so limited. It'd take a thread of four, five, six or more toots to put a long image description into toots while the same image description would fit into alt-text perfectly well.

Absolutely everywhere else in the Fediverse, this doesn't matter. Only Mastodon has this extremely low and hard-coded limit. If an instance admin wants to change it, they have to essentially fork Mastodon and edit the source code.

#MissKey has a default limit of 3,000 characters; #Firefish, formerly known as #CalcKey, has at least that many. #Pleroma and #Akkoma have a default limit of 5,000 characters, and so does #GoToSocial. #Friendica, #Hubzilla and what resides in the #Streams repository have what amounts to an unlimited character count with actual limits way up in the tens of thousands of characters.

Also, on instances of these projects, the limits are not hard-coded but admin settings instead. They're likely to vary from instance to instance.

All these projects allow as long #AltTexts as Mastodon or even longer alt-texts. On Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), alt-text is part of the post, so it's virtually unlimited itself. But with such high character counts for posts, it no longer makes sense to put image descriptions into alt-text if the post itself has twice as much space as the alt-text or even more.

There is no technical reason not to put image descriptions into the post body. If anything, it's a question of style; it isn't always elegant to shove a massive image description into a post. But otherwise, putting it into alt-text has no advantage over putting it into the post body where it actually belongs.

In fact, if it's longer than 1,500 characters, it should never go into alt-text, regardless of how much alt-text you can write on your instance. That's because all projects that limit alt-text to 1,500 characters cut off longer alt-texts at 1,500 characters. Posts that are longer than the limit, however, are never cut off. Even Mastodon can handle and display 15,000-character posts from Hubzilla without cutting off the last 14,500 characters. Trust me, I've tried that.

(To be continued...)
hub.netzgemeinde.euWhat the Fediverse keeps getting wrong about image descriptionsNo, image descriptions don't necessarily go into alt-text; CW: multiple posts with thousands of characters each, non-Mastodon user questioning Mastodon culture

@jupiter_rowland you'd have to have a 15yr old screen reader to have the character limit and it wouldn't work with any browser today ...