Post #2485437

2023-07-24 06:17 UTC

@jupiter_rowland I've been mostly offline for ten days, but have the internet again so… The W3C actually has a bunch of how-to and best practice info on their site… https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/ We are both correct in a sense…. Empty alt="" are much more acceptable/preferred than I thought. Basically… text/info in image… summarize in the #AltText. Content of photo is basically described in the body of the post… empty. Image is purely decorative… empty. Image is part of a link or navigation element (or an icon) alt="function of link", etc. So back to my original complaint… sometimes the basic info (like what kind of bird it is) is NOT in the post, but there is extensive info in the alt text. I'm arguing that some of that info be made visible as part of the post. Example… POST: "Hey look at these great birds!" IMAGE ALT TEXT: Full paragraph describing each bird, genus species, location, what they're feeding on, etc. I'm going to stop documenting everything twice!

Replies (1)

@jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu 2023-07-24 06:46

@@richardrathe@universeodon.com In this case, the post is about the picture. The post was made to show the picture. And in this case, yes, it can make sense to put a detailed description into the body of the post itself Now imagine that the post is actually 400 characters about how kingfishers are a protected species in Germany, or how pigeons can be not only a nuisance, but actually a health threat in big cities. In this case, the post is not about the picture. If there's a picture, it's redundant, unnecessary and purely added as something between decoration and nice-to-have illustration. Adding a full description of the picture in the body of the post does not look too good, not if the post is not about the picture. Okay, now you may argue that a 400-character post won't leave much room for an image description. Not if you write it on most Mastodon instances. But absolutely everywhere else in the Fediverse, you can have a 400-character post + a picture + several thousand characters of image description. I myself could probably write posts in excess of 50,000 characters altogether.

Open ##2485438