A map to the future

A tourist uses a map of Rome to shield themselves from the sun beside the base of the Temple of Venus and Roma, opposite the Colosseum, in Rome, June 20. REUTERS/Guglielmo Mangiapane

#photography
#Rome
#ClimateChange
#GlobalWarming
#AltText

Alt...

A close-up, side view profile of a tourist walking outdoors in bright, harsh sunlight during a heatwave. The tourist's head and face are completely covered and shielded by a colorful, unfolded paper street map of Rome (showing the winding Tiber River), which they are holding up like a makeshift sun hat. In the blurred background, another tourist wearing a straw hat and sunglasses walks past a black metal gate.

Surf now supports alt text. When you're creating a new post and upload an image, you'll now see an ALT button.

#AltText #SurfApp #Accessibility

Alt...

A screenshot of the Surf app showing what happens when you hit the ALT button — there is a photo of a black-and-white dog beside an image of Vermeer's "Girl With A Pearl Earring" painting and on the left of the image it says ALT. Below that is a box that says Describe this image for people using screen readers and below that is the text, A photo of a black-and-white dog beside an image of Vermeer's "Girl With A Pearl Earring" painting. They look just the same!

@publicdomainrev

#alttext

BIRTH, n. The first and direst of disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucome-don was the son of a cavern in Mount Ætna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.
- Ambrose Bierce

Interesting post without alt-text: favourite.

Interesting post with alt-text: boost.

https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images

#altText #accessibility #inclusivity #mastodon #fediverse

@publicdomainrev

#alttext

A picture of the sun in yellow and orange with a serious face and surrounded with long rays, rising over a medieval town with meadows and a couple of dead trees in the foreground.

YAKAMOZ (Turkish):
The reflection of the moon on the surface of the water.While pop-linguistics books often frame this purely as a romantic, untranslatable word for moonlight, its scientific and historical roots are even more fascinating.

#Linguistics
#Etymology
#Bioluminescence
#Nature
#Language
#Words
#photography
#StarTrails
#AltText

Alt...

A long-exposure night photograph by Mark Stewart capturing a dramatic coastal landscape filled with glowing bioluminescence and star trails. The vertical composition looks down onto a rugged, rocky coastline where sharp stone ledges and cliffs jut out into the ocean. The water directly colliding with these rocky shores glows with a vibrant, electric neon-blue light, caused by bioluminescent organisms activated by the motion of the waves. In contrast to the glowing blue water below, the night sky above is captured in a long exposure, filling the upper half of the frame with hundreds of white, parallel star trails arcing diagonally across the sky. Along the horizon, a warm, golden-orange glow from a setting moon or distant light illuminates the silhouette of distant mountains and the dense evergreen forest lining the clifftops. The smooth, misty texture of the ocean water creates a serene, ethereal atmosphere that bridges the glowing sea and the streaking stars.

@medieval_illuminations

Unfortunately, the alt text (alternative descriptive text for the image) does not describe what can be seen in the image :(

#Alttext

#FensterFreitag

This is an exceedingly high building around Park Ave and 52nd St. It is completely covered in scaffolding from the bottom to the top, including the layers that go to the top. I've been editing again. This was a great deal of fun to do. It's the top two layers of the building and all the little lines that look like scratches are actually scaffolding. #Photography #NYC #AltText #iPhonePhotography

Alt...

A color photo, sort of. I cropped out the bottom of the building. It is just the top two sections and they have been completely covered in scaffolding. Underneath are tons of modern windows in a pattern of a row of rectangles, then a row of squares etc. The coloring was edited then I reversed the image. So the sky and background are pitch black and the building stands out as though it's being lit from behind in an off white / yellow. It looks as though there are scratches all over the building and small lines can be seen coming out on the left side going up. Those are all pieces of the scaffolding. It's a bit experimental 😊

So how do they think it can be enforced everywhere?

• They'll simply tell you to do it.
• They'll lecture you about it.
• They'll call you out if you don't do it.
• Once they've caught you not doing it repeatedly, they'll insult you as ableist.
• They'll block you. Before they block you, they'll announce in public that they'll block you because you're an ableist swine who refuses to add alt-text to his images, and they'll mention you so that you can see it.
  If you're only here to get and stay in contact with a select few people, none of whom are on Mastodon, you might not care.
  But if you need a certain amount of reach especially on Mastodon, this is bad.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

I've not yet seen any posts, attacking or otherwise, taking this stance

Right now, this feature is only available in a development version of Mastodon and only on mastodon.social. Next will be the daredevil servers that run development code to be ahead of release in features.

But eventually, a new stable release will be rolled out with this feature. More and more servers will be upgraded to this new version with this feature. Once typical activist servers like beige.party introduce it, my prediction will come true.

I have family who have varying levels of blindness who consume media from all over the internet. All of them have been quite thrilled about the state of these new robot assistants we all now have such easy access to.

Specifically assigned "alt-text" is never necessary.

In fact, however, image-describing AI is just barely better than nothing, if at all. It describes stuff that doesn't matter. It doesn't describe stuff that does matter. Most importantly, it's unreliable and inaccurate. It hallucinates and describes stuff wrongly. However, people who aren't sufficiently sighted don't know. They can't verify whether what the AI says is true because they can't see the image well enough to be able to compare it with the description.

100% hand-written alt-text is always more reliable, more accurate and more fit for the context than AI-generated alt-text will ever be.

I know from first-hand experience. I've tasked an image-describing AI with describing an image which I've described manually with no AI help first, and then I've analysed the AI description and compared it with both the actual image and my descriptions. I've even done that twice. The results were abysmal.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon

Not sure if this was rolled out on mastodon.social just recently, or a while ago, with all the other UI updates, but only noticing it now, and it is very nice!

#mastodon #accessibility #AltText

Alt...

A screenshot of the profile edit interface on Mastodon, showing a menu with an "Add alt text" option highlighted.

#DoorsDay

A lovely door on Gramercy Park. It's a pretty area, but it's a locked park that people in certain buildings get keys to open. I have rarely, if ever, seen anyone in the park. It's so sad, that there's this beautiful space that never gets used.
#NYC #Photography #AltText #iPhonePhotography

Alt...

A color photo taken from the sidewalk up towards a set of stairs to a brownstone. The stairs and side pieces are made from a rust colored stone. They're about 10 stairs going up and each riser has four squares spaced out that are rimmed in black with a black X in the middle. It makes a pattern going up the stairs. The railings are very old style with a heavy black rod iron railing on top with brass fittings. In the foreground on the right at the base of the stairs the stonework curves around and turns into it's own street lamp. It is also black wrought iron. The doors at the top of the stairs are back with a criss cross pattern on the panels. Around the door is more of the ornate stonework in rust and on the left side are some carved rectangles going up the side of the building with plain ones in between. On the right side is the yellowish stone from the brown store next door and the leaves from a tree

Berck, France
A woman with two children wades in the water to board a small boat off the coast of France, in an attempt to cross the Channel.
Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

#photography
#refugees
#France
#AltText

Alt...

A photograph from behind of a woman wading through chest-deep sea water, tightly holding her two children as they move toward a crowded inflatable migrant boat blurred in the distance. The mother wears a patterned pink headscarf and a white shirt, with her arms wrapped protectively around her children, who are both wearing bright orange life jackets.

@publicdomainrev

#alttext

16 photographs of a horse running. In the second, third and fourth images all four feet are clearly off the ground. In the first and last images the horses legs are in the same positions.

More black swan events like this, please.

The latest brood of black swan cygnets make their first appearance on the Brook.

Photograph: Mark Passmore

#photography
#birds
#BlackSwans
#cygnets
#AltText

Alt...

A close-up shot of an adult black swan swimming in rippling water, viewed from the side. The swan has glossy black feathers dotted with tiny droplets of water, a long curved neck, and a striking bright red bill with a white band near the tip. Tucked snugly between its ruffled back feathers is a tiny, fluffy grey and white cygnet looking directly ahead. In the softly blurred background, another small, fluffy cygnet floats nearby on the water's surface.

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip
A workshop that recycles dresses to produce wedding gowns and other garments. In April, 300 couples took part in a mass wedding celebration in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza.

Photograph: Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images

#photography
#Gaza
#wedding
#dress
#AltText

Alt...

A headless mannequin wearing a large, full-skirted white wedding dress stands on a paved sidewalk in the middle of a city street. To the left, various formal dresses hang outside a shop front where a man in a blue t-shirt stands with his back turned. To the right, a woman wearing a niqab and a dark green abaya walks past while looking down at her phone. The background features worn, multi-story buildings with visible damage under a clear blue sky, with a white car parked across the street.

#SilentSunday #Hiking #AltText

Alt...

A mature bald eagle withe a stern-looking face and characteristic white head is perched on the long, stout limb of a Douglas fir tree that is full of green seed cones. It's body is obscured by the tree limb but its head is in full view, looking down with piercing eyes, it's big beak bright bellow and cured like a scimitar.

Here's the image (CW: eye contact): https://streams.elsmussols.net/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/ff28c33e-f633-4801-ad2b-c3dcd40d7bf9

Here's the alt-text:

Image macro, based on a screen capture from the Disney and Pixar animated film Finding Nemo. At the top, there is a white space with a two-line caption: “OSgrid: offline for weeks to come,” and “Owners of other grids, looking at OSgrid residents:”. In the screen capture below, ten seagulls are perched on two mooring lines in the background. An eleventh seagull pokes its head into the image from the bottom right. They all look at the camera. Each one is labelled with the question, “Mine?”

Do you understand the image without explanations?

I guarantee you that there are loads of people who don't even understand the template, and that next to nobody out there understands the topic. Not without an explanation.

So here's the explanation in the post text, including a link to the corresponding KnowYourMeme page:

Explanation:

The image macro is based on the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template (link CW: eye contact; https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mine-mine-mine-seagulls).

OSgrid (https://osgrid.org) is a 3-D virtual world, based on OpenSimulator (http://opensimulator.org; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSimulator; https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/ba1b1cb6-7c18-410e-8752-df4b4face2e0), a free, open-source server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life (https://www.secondlife.com; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life). Like Second Life and all other OpenSimulator-based worlds, it is called a "grid" because it is divided into square regions bordering on each other.

Launched in July, 2007, OSgrid was the first public OpenSimulator grid, it is the oldest and one of the biggest by both land area and users. This means that while it's running bleeding-edge developer versions of OpenSimulator, it also carries around a whole lot of old ballast. It is notorious for going offline for maintenance and for this maintenance often lasting for a week or several, and it is just as notorious for going offline with no announcement and either only a very belated explanation by the admins or none at all.

The last prolonged downtime before this one was in 2025. It included OSgrid's entire asset server being wiped clean, and all avatars in OSgrid having their inventories emptied almost completely. It was scheduled, but due to OSgrid's instability at the time, it happened spontaneously and way ahead of schedule. The OSgrid admins could not say for how long OSgrid would be offline, but they estimated the downtime to exceed one month. In addition, for several years before that shutdown, each OSgrid shutdown had led to more and more lost assets already.

This drove many OSgrid residents away from OSgrid and to other OpenSimulator grids. Most of them, OSgrid included, are connected by the so-called Hypergrid which makes it possible for avatars from one grid to teleport to other grids, so it doesn't matter much which grid your avatar is registered on when you want to travel to certain locations or events. Many of those who had left OSgrid when it was offline returned after it went online again because the asset server had been promised to work as intended now.

Still, with OSgrid's track record of unreliability and, most importantly, losing assets, some residents fear that the current downtime might break more than it will fix. Not few think that if they've lost their whole inventories "unannounced" last time, they will lose their whole inventories actually unannounced this time. And so they're looking for a new home again.

Of course, this has the owners and admins of many other grids wishing for as many OSgrid residents as possible to join their grids. The advertising of other grids in the wake of OSgrid's downtime has already begun.

Now, there are people who say that linking to external explanations is ableist crap because that's inconvenient, and because these external websites may not be sufficiently accessible. Oh, and links don't work in alt-text (only that the above link went into the post text where links do work). So if you post something that needs to be explained, explain it yourself.

Sure, but that'll be an explanation of the "Mine? Mine? Mine? Seagulls" meme template. In addition, there will have to be one explanation for Reddit and one for reaction images because people won't understand the template explanation otherwise. On top of that, there will have to be an explanation for image boards, Futaba Channel and 4chan because people won't understand the reaction image explanation otherwise. In fact, I might also have to explain the film Finding Nemo.

For comparison, I've once posted something based on "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor". It was the only time I've explained the whole thing myself. That was one explanation for my image, six for the template, two for the topic (and that was actually Fediverse-related, but still obscure), that's nine altogether. I haven't even explained The Lord of the Rings, the character Boromir and that particular situation. Still, that was 25,000 characters of explanation overall, half of which accounted for the six explanations for the template.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

I'm talking about a wholly separate explanation in the post text body. Like, where you'd write the actual toot. Where you probably only have 500 characters. Where you wrote the above comment. It's there where I want to put the explanation.

The story behind this is as follows:

I keep reading from Mastodon users that alt-texts (yes, actual alt-texts in this case) are useful for sighted people, too, because alt-texts can give them explanations and help them understand what they're looking at. This means that images must not only be described, but also explained if necessary.

On the one hand, I keep telling Mastodon users again and again that explanations do not belong into the alt-text because there are people who can't access and read alt-texts; Mastodon users tend to be very defensive of using alt-texts to extend their 500-character limit by another 1,500 characters per image.

Still, on the other hand, this means that especially Mastodon users want images that they don't understand to come with explanations right away. In particular, neurodivergent people often need explanations, in-depth explanations even. It appears to have gotten to a point where posting an image that needs explanations without explanations is considered just as careless and almost as ableist as posting an image without accurate and sufficiently detailed alt-text.

At the same time, whenever I post an image of any kind, memes included, they're about such obscure topics that they need an explanation. Also, not everyone is always familiar with every meme template, so I have to give an explanation for the meme templates I've used as well. So I always explain whatever might need to be explained.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #500Characters #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Ableist #Ableism #AbleismMeta #CWAbleismMeta

This stunning Pink Peace hybrid tea rose is the most scented rose I’ve ever grown. It’s sits right outside my workshop window where I can enjoy its fragrance wafting through the open window. I love that the under side of the petals is almost white while the fronts are an intense fuchsia.

#BloomScrolling #FragranceFriday #In MyGarden #AltText

Alt...

Close-up side view of a “Pink Peace” hybrid tea rose flower fully open. The medium fuchsia petals are curled back on the edges, exposing darker fuchsia veining. The backs of the petals are very light white to pink. The background is dark green leaves.

@publicdomainrev

#alttext

Drawings of the meteorite doing various gyrations and splitting, and with various configurations of smoke and clouds surrounding it.
W.R. v. Haidinger. Knyahinya.
Joh. Bortoluzasi lith
Fall des Meteors um 9. Juni 1866.
Aus der ki Hobu Staatsdruriens
Fig. 1.2 u. 3 aus der Nähe von Eperies von Herrn Johann Kolbay gesehen. Fig.4. von Herrn Rainer in Kapi bei Eperies gesehen ven Herrn Kolbay gemalt. Fig. 5. a,b,e, vom Ortsrichter Jah Babak in Varollyn bei Eperies gesehen, von Herrn Joh Kolbay mitgetheilt
Sitzungsbericht der k. Akad. d.W.math. naturw, CL, LOV. Bd.Ⅱ. Abth. 1866.

Your own posts aren't any better anyway; CW: long (over 1,300 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, alt-text meta, image description meta, character limit meta, hashtag meta

View article

View summary

@David Mitchell :CApride: On the other hand, when I look at your personal timeline, it's obvious that you've never really arrived on Mastodon. You break all kinds of rules. You break alt-text and image-describing rules, and you break Mastodon's cultural rules.

You write alt-texts in multiple paragraphs. You almost never use CWs, not for posts over 500 characters, not for US or Canadian politics, not for wars, never. You rarely use hashtags, and when you do, you sometimes put them in-line instead of all into the bottom line. In-line hashtags are inconvenient for screen reader users.

You boost image posts without checking whether the images have alt-texts, much less whether the alt-texts are accurate, sufficiently detailed and in line with the existing alt-text and image description rules. You boost posts about potentially disturbing topics that have no CWs.

So don't come lecturing me if your own doings are likely to get you silently muted and blocked by other Mastodon users left and right.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #CharacterLimitMeta #CWCharacterLimitMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #MastodonCulture

(see the crazy AltText for example)

It seems to me that #AltText may be helpful to AI bots snarfing data. Since detailed descriptions are included this may be of great advantage to the AI intelligence curve for building more accurate scanning and analysis datasets.

One way to gum the gears might be to include non-sequitur AltText with noisy images where you don't want bots to benefit.

Alt...

Boris Beefcake has broken out of prison. A white supremacist duck named Boris Beefcake is wanted for assault with a unfriendly weapon in his bid to segregate geese and mallards. He is displaying his unfriendly weapon in this mugshot while drinking alcohol-free whiskey from the dewdrops. With his unfriendly weapon Boris Beefcake has an ugly mug only a mother could slap.