@pencilears@mastodon.eternalaugust.com I think a lot of people have unrealistically high expectations for alt text, and as a consequence they add a bunch of fluff, which makes writing alt-text feel daunting if that's the standard. Looking at this phenomenon from outside of Mastodon (I'm on Hubzilla), I've got the impression that this has become engrained into Mastodon's very culture. Mastodon has a limit of 1,500 characters so that the text in images with a lot of text can be transcribed in alt-text. However, many Mastodon users, knowing everything they know about online accessibility, take this as an invitation to write very detailed visual descriptions. Other Mastodon users cheer and applaud for these long descriptions. Maybe it's just my impression. Maybe I'm wrong. But I kind of expect at least some Mastodon users to start both demanding and enforcing very long and detailed alt-texts/image descriptions, regardless of long alt-texts actually being bad for various reasons and even Mastodon users saying so. I mean, I've already read several times that images must also be explained if their topic or their content is uncommon. In the alt-text, of course. Even though explanations in the alt-text are not accessible to people with certain disabilities. But most Mastodon users can't imagine that at least some Fediverse users can pour thousands or even millions of characters into the message text. Nonetheless, this gives the impression of Mastodon's culture demanding any and all extra information that people may need about an image be immediately delivered on a silver platter, along with the image. Granted, if what the image shows is obscure enough, and especially if it also might make people curious enough, this appears to be justified. The former definitely does apply to my own original images, and chances are the latter applies, too. Technically speaking, my original images need a whole lot of explanation because nobody has ever even heard of what they show, and they also need highly detailed descriptions because nobody who can't see the image has even only the faintest idea of what anything in the image looks like. So what I do is describe each one of my original images twice. One description is the long description; it's fully detailed, it contains transcripts of all bits of text within the borders of the image, and it contains all necessary explanations. It goes into the message text, and it's pretty much always a five-digit number of characters long. The other description is shorter, and it goes into the alt-text in order to satisfy those alt-text hardliners who demand there be an actually descriptive alt-text even if there's an extremely detailed image description in the message text. I used to fill Mastodon's limit of 1,500 characters up almost or actually entirely. My future alt-texts might be limited to a bit over 500 characters because Misskey and its many forks delete alt-texts that are longer than 512 characters. (Then again, they also discard anything with a message text of over 10,000 characters, I think.) Describing one image takes me from several hours up to two full days. I rarely receive any praise for this effort. But I guess the downside is that each original image that I post has the channel on which I post my original images now (as rarely as this happens) silently muted or blocked by a whole number of Mastodon users for exceeding the holy 500-character limit. I try to play it safe. I try to always be ahead of Mastodon's alt-text police, far enough for them not to demand I edit the image descriptions of a three-year-old image post because they're sub-standard. So in addition to these monster descriptions, I have over 30 rules and guidelines for describing images and writing alt-texts that I adhere to as strictly as I possibly can. And yes, I also expect most of them to be enforced by the alt-text police sooner or later. CC: @tiefling@bardicperspiration.club #Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #MastodonCulture