@Garry Knight @qurly(not curly)joe This, by the way, is something that next to nobody in the Fediverse knows, and that many will deny and fight with all they can:

Alt-text must never include exclusive information that is neither in the post text nor in the image itself. Such information must always go into the post itself. If you don't have room in the post, add it to a reply or multiple.

That's because not everybody can access alt-text. Certain physical disabilities can make accessing alt-text impossible, for example, if someone can't use their hands. Money quote from way down this comment thread:

Deborah schrieb den folgenden Beitrag Mon, 10 Jul 2023 23:30:45 +0200 @jupiter_rowland

I have a disability that prevents me from seeing alt text, because on almost all platforms, seeing the alt requires having a screenreader or working hands. If you post a picture, is there info that you want somebody who CAN see the picture but DOESN’T have working hands to know? Write that in visible text. If you put that in the alt, you are explicitly excluding people like me.

But you don’t have to overthink it. The description of the image itself is a simple concept.

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@sunflowerinrain @Tarnport From what I've read, a digital photograph is considered the default. So for brevity reasons, it must not be mentioned.

Any other media must be mentioned, whether it's a painting, a screenshot from a social media app, a scanned analogue photograph, a flowchart, a CAD blueprint, a 3-D rendering or whatever.

But an alt-text must never start with "Image of", "Picture of" or "Photo of". That's considered bad style and a waste of characters and screen-reading time. If the medium is not mentioned, digital photograph falls into its place as a default.

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@Robert Kingett Honest question from an alt-text and image description perfectionist to a blind user: When is it actually accessible enough that whoever posts an image doesn't have to fear repercussions?

Okay, there has to be an alt-text. It has to actually describe the image. So much is clear to me.

And I guess that while at least some blind people in the Fediverse treasure whimsy higher than accuracy, others may want alt-text to be accurate.

But it looks to me like there is a rather narrow margin between alt-text with not enough details and alt-text that's too long and/or too detailed. This isn't communicated anywhere. It's unclear, too, whether that margin is always the same, or whether it shifts with the content of the image, the context and someone's individual idea of who the audience of an image post is.

And seriously, there are images that simply cannot be described in a way that's perfectly ideal and useful for absolutely everyone out there. I've posted such images in the past, and my image descriptions must have broken all length records in the Fediverse. But I think not everyone is happy about having to read through such monsters.

CC: @Stefan Bohacek @Olivier Mehani @Alina Leonova

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@Ciara @Boab I guess there are enough signs that my image descriptions are hand-written, especially for my original virtual world renderings.

• Alt-texts which lately keep reaching exactly 1,500 characters or only few characters short of that limit.
• Alt-texts that also mention an even longer image description in the post. And there is an even longer image description in the post. Who asks an AI to describe an image in lots of details and then again in even more details?
• No AI can produce image descriptions with five-digit character counts like the long one in the post.
• Excessive detail information about an absolutely obscure niche topic in the long description.
• Description of visual details that aren't visible at the image's resolution.
• Transcripts of text that isn't legible or not even visible at the image's resolution.
• Sometimes I run an extra thread with an image-describing log.

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@Jürgen Hubert One solution that hasn't been mentioned yet: Get yourself a Bluetooth hardware keyboard that's large enough for touch-typing but compact enough to take it with you if you have a bag or something.

I myself wouldn't trust any AI to properly describe my own images, not after actually pitting one against my own hand-written image descriptions twice and seeing it fail miserably. But then again, describing my images in a way that I deem sufficiently is practically impossible for AI unless it's absolutely omniscient.

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@Ciara I usually don't even take an image when I don't know how to describe it properly.

Still, it tends to happen that I get stuck on the description of some detail for way too long. I mean, I want to use the right terms and words and then explain them afterwards.

And your problem is the very reason why I avoid having buildings in my images. Having to describe four pictures of galaxies for a series of three images was tough enough for me to skip them and postpone them until most of the rest was described. And identifying all four galaxies wasn't even the hardest part, but it took me a while.

The last time I posted an image, I took an urban setting into consideration. But then I realised that I'd spend an eternity describing all the buildings in the image, including researching architectural features and their names. And so I went somewhere that was easier to describe. Granted, I discovered I still had to describe a motel building, but that building was fairly simple.

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