I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application.
I’m looking for something
- in the Fediverse
- with technology that supports discussions
- where users know the Fediverse beyond whatever software that particular place is running on
- where users know something about how and why to make Fediverse posts accessible for e.g. blind users
- where users take this topic seriously instead of seeing it as a gimmick
- where it’s likely enough for someone to reply to posts
Mastodon takes accessibility very seriously. But Mastodon users never look beyond Mastodon. Every other Mastodon user doesn’t even know that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon. Most of those who do have no idea what the rest of the Fediverse is like, including what it can do that Mastodon can’t, and what it can’t do that Mastodon can. Many Mastodon users even reject the Fediverse outside Mastodon, and be it because it “refuses” to fully adopt Mastodon’s culture and throw its own cultures overboard. This would include using features that Mastodon doesn’t have. You’re easily being muted or blocked upon first strike if you dare to post more than 500 characters at once.
I myself am mostly on Hubzilla. Not only is Hubzilla vastly more powerful than Mastodon, it is also vastly different, and being older than Mastodon as well, it had grown its own culture before Mastodon came along. Still, three out of four Mastodon users have never even heard of the existence of Hubzilla, and many who do are likely to think it’s basically Mastodon with a higher character count, extra stuff glued on and a clunky UI.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Mastodon, you end up only discussing Mastodon accessibility with exactly zero regards, understanding or interest for what the rest of the Fediverse is like.
Besides, Mastodon has no good support for conversations and no real concept of threads. It is impossible to follow a discussion thread or to even only know that there have been new replies without having been mentioned in these replies. Thus, any attempt at discussing something on Mastodon is futile.
Hubzilla itself is great for discussions. It even has had groups/forums as a feature from the very beginning. In practice, however, it has precious few forums. The same applies to (streams) even more.
Discussing Fediverse accessibility is completely futile on both. They don’t “do accessibility”. To their users, alt-text is some fad that was invented on Mastodon, and Hubzilla and (streams) don’t do Mastodon crap, full stop. In fact, their users hate Mastodon with a passion for deliberately, intentionally being so limited and trying to push its own limitations, its proprietary, non-standard solutions and its culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. At the same time, they don’t really know that much about Mastodon, and they aren’t interested in it.
Most of this applies to Friendica as well, but Hubzilla and (streams) users sometimes go as far as disabling ActivityPub altogether to keep Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based microblogging projects out, and they don’t care if Friendica ends up collateral damage. They hate the non-nomadic majority of the Fediverse that much.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Hubzilla, nobody would know what you’re even talking about, and nobody would want to know because they take it for another stupid Mastodon fad. They probably don’t even understand why I accept connection requests from Mastodon in the first place.
Here on Lemmy, I’ve seen a number of dedicated accessibility communities. But they seem to be only about accessibility on the greater Web and in real life and not a bit about accessibility in the Fediverse specifically. I’m not even sure if Lemmy itself “does accessibility” in any way. And I’m not sure how aware Lemmy is of the Fediverse beyond Lemmy, /kbin and Mastodon.
Besides, these communities aren’t much more than the admin posting stuff and nobody ever replying. So I guess trying to actually discuss something there is completely useless. If I post a question, I’ll probably never get a reply.
The reason why I’m asking here first is because this community is actually active enough for people to reply to posts. But I’m not sure if it’s good for discussing super-specific details about making non-Threadiverse Fediverse posts accessible.
Yes.
When I post images on Hubzilla, I always describe them. I have connections not only within Hubzilla, but mostly on Mastodon and also elsewhere (Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey, Firefish etc. etc., all over the place).
The problem I have is three-fold: One, my images are extreme edge-cases topic-wise. They’re about 3-D virtual worlds. Very obscure 3-D virtual worlds. As in, maybe one out of 200,000 Fediverse users even knows the underlying system, and I’m not even talking about the specific place where I’ve taken an image. This makes very extensive image descriptions necessary because I can’t suppose that people already know what whatever is in the images looks like. And it makes very extensive explanations within the image descriptions necessary so that people get the images in the first place.
I can’t take anything about my pictures for common knowledge. I need over 1,000 characters alone to explain where an image is from.
Two, I’m not bound to the same limitations as your average Fediverse user when it comes to describing the image. I don’t only look at the image when I’m describing it. I look at the real deal in-world when I’m describing it. This gives me an almost infinite zoom factor. I can see things in-world that are so tiny in the image that they’re invisible. I can describe and actually have described in the past images within my image. And nearly on the same level as the image that I was actually describing.
Three, I’m not bound to the same limitations as your average Mastodon user when it comes to posting an image description. I am bound to the 1,500-character alt-text limit because Mastodon truncates longer alt-text and throws the excess characters away. But I do not have a 500-character limit. I don’t have any character limit at all. I can post 80,000 characters, and Mastodon will show these 80,000 characters, all of them, and so will other Fediverse projects.
So I can put full, detailed image descriptions of nearly any length into the post text body. This is completely unimaginable on Mastodon. And that’s why I can’t discuss these things with Mastodon users: They can’t even imagine what I’m doing.
Anyhow, this leads me into situations which are just as completely unimaginable for Mastodon users, which I therefore can’t discuss with people who only know Mastodon. And this raises questions for me which people who only know Mastodon can’t answer because they can’t even imagine why I’d ask something like that, because the very concept is alien to them.
This started early on in last summer when I started to seriously describe my images after I had found out that many Mastodon users like highly detailed image descriptions. My first attempt at writing one ended with over 13,000 characters of image description, and I couldn’t possibly reduce them without losing content. So I wanted to know where the best place to put such a long image description would be. I didn’t even get an answer. So I had to figure out from other posts and their replies that it’s always best to keep image descriptions and explanations as close to the image as possible, i.e. in the same post. I’m still not sure if that’s what Mastodon users, especially disabled users, would prefer in my case.
Then more and more questions came up.
Do I have to describe images in images? Images in images in images?
For example, the rule is that if there’s text within the borders of the image, it must be transcribed. However, this rule does not define edge-cases because it doesn’t take edge-cases into consideration. What about text that’s so small in the image that it’s visible, but illegible (3 pixels high)? Or text that’s so small in the image that it’s invisible (less than a pixel high)? Or text that’s partly obscured in the image (poster-sized sign with a tree trunk in front of it)? Must I, may I or mustn’t I transcribe it? Again, let’s suppose that I can read it in-world with no problems.
Or from which point on is it required to warn about eye contact? (I actually got an answer to this from someone who knows. If an eye can be made out in an image, then an eye contact warning is necessary. I was told that, yes, there are autistic persons who are triggered by an eye that’s 1/100th of a pixel high and 1/100 of a pixel wide.)
All stuff that you never think about when all you ever post are fairly simple real-life photographs.
I do not want to discuss these topics in this thread! If anything, my plan is to start separate threads for each of these.
My goal is simply to find a place where I can discuss them with people who know enough to be able to give me sensible answers that I can work with.
If you think this Lemmy community is such a place, then I’ll stay and ask away, and then and only then I’d like to see competent answers to my questions.
But if you think that nobody here will be able to understand what I want because what I’m asking is just too alien for everyone here, then it doesn’t make sense to try and ask.
Oh well. That’s a bit more complicated than I thought.
First of all, it might be true that people here won’t understand you. And I’m not sure if Lemmy is the right choice for you anyways. The OpenSim community doesn’t seem very active. And since you’re talking about 13.000 character descriptions… That will also not fly on Lemmy. I think we have a 10k character limit for posts and comments here. You’d exceed that here, too.
And then Mastodon is a microblogging platform. Originally intended for short messages. I know some people use it for a different purpose. And some people go there because of the short and concise messages. So I’m not really sure if that’s your place either. It might be you using the wrong tool for your task, since it’s intended for a different purpose and you’d need a different tool.
I mean I don’t know where the community of 3D worlds mingle… Maybe you can take some inspiration from them if you’re not the only one.
But it could very well the case that the alt-text and character limits of the platforms aren’t the issue here. But you choosing platforms that are not suited for your task. I’d say if your texts regularly exceed a few thousand characters, you don’t want a microblogging platform, but a macro-blogging (or just blogging) platform. There are some that are meant for long texts. And you can even use Wordpress or something like that, do your own blog and install an ActivityPub plugin if you want a connection to the Fediverse. I mean in the old times, people used more than social media and shared their thoughts in forums or on a personal blog, or a website dedicated to a topic. That comes with almost no restrictions.
Ultimately, I haven’t seen your posts/toots. And I don’t really know the alt-text culture on Mastodon. Maybe my advice isn’t that good.
Another thing: Is it really necessary to write that super detailed description in an alt-text? As far as I’ve learned about alt-text in webdesign, that is originally intended to give a concise description of the image in the context regarding the rest of the text. It is meant to be short and concise, like a tweet. It’s read by screenreaders and displayed if the image didn’t load. It’d be more something like: “a medieval market squares with dozens of booths, bustling with player activity.” But you won’t describe what’s sold in the market stand at the bottom right, or the portal on the left, unless it’s important in the context of the rest of your post. If you want to do a comprehensive analysis or a discussion like in art class, I’d say that goes into the main body text, and not into the alt-text. I’d consider that “abuse” of the alt tag. And it might even do a disservice to people who need accessibility, who now get a completely different experience than everybody else. I’d put that detailed description into the normal text. Maybe make it a spoiler so it collapses.
In the end I’m not part of that community, and everything depends on what you’re trying to achieve. But that’d be my perspective: A blog would be better suited. And long descriptions go into the body text, not the alt-text. And if you choose to write longer blog posts, you can still link them on Lemmy, or post a link to it on Mastodon.
Then allow me to make it less complicated. Or even more complicated.
It has never been my plan to post images with such massive descriptions on Lemmy. Lemmy doesn’t require image descriptions. It doesn’t require alt-text either. It doesn’t even officially support alt-text. Lemmy doesn’t live and enforce a culture of accessibility.
Most importantly, though: The OpenSim community has no subscribers on general-purpose Mastodon instances. What’s posted there will most likely never appear in the federated timeline of e.g. mastodon.social where people could get all riled up about the lack of alt-text and image description.
Besides, the 13,000-character image description is outdated already. My image descriptions have grown since then. 25,000 characters, 40,000 characters, and yesterday, I’ve posted a 60,000-character description for an image that also got an alt-text precisely at Mastodon’s limit of 1,500 characters.
**I don’t intend to post my images on Mastodon either.
I intend to keep posting them on Hubzilla (official website).**
Hubzilla has got nothing to do with Mastodon. It was first released in 2015, ten months before Mastodon. It was renamed and repurposed from the Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010.
Hubzilla is vastly different from Mastodon in just about everything. Like its predecessors, it has never had a character limit, and it has always had the full set of features of text formatting and post design as any full-blown long-form blogging platform out there. In fact, maybe even more than that.
Hubzilla is not a microblogging project. It can work as one, but it can seamlessly transition between microblogging and fully featured long-form blogging and everything in-between. Hubzilla is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, renamed from a fork of a Facebook alternative that was created also with blogging in mind.
So I want to post my images on Hubzilla.
What does this have to do with Mastodon then?
It has to do with Mastodon that I’ve got lots of Mastodon connections. All my OpenSim connections except for one are on Mastodon, and I think all of these are on one and the same OpenSim-themed instance. But on top of that, I’ve got hundreds of Mastodon connections all over the place, including mastodon.social and other big general-purpose instances.
And all those non-OpenSim Mastodon connections came to exist because they followed me. It was not my decision to follow them. They followed me because they expected me to explain the Fediverse beyond Mastodon to them because I had recently done so. Or they followed me because they had freshly arrived from Twitter, and they desperately needed Mastodon to feel like Twitter, including lots of uninteresting background noise in their personal timeline, so they followed everyone and everything they came across in the federated timeline.
So my image posts on Hubzilla will automatically federate to Mastodon and appear in people’s Mastodon timelines. And it isn’t my decision.
Sure, on Hubzilla, I have the power to limit precisely who can see my posts by only sending them to specific connections. But I want the Fediverse world out there to see the marvels of OpenSim, to learn that free, decentralised 3-D virtual worlds have been reality since 2007, that “the metaverse” is anything but dead and not invented by Zuckerberg. I don’t want to remain stuck in an echo chamber.
Oh, and by the way: Mastodon can receive posts up to a maximum length of 100,000 characters by default. Also, Mastodon does not truncate long posts. It only truncates alt-text that exceeds 1,500 characters. But it leaves posts up to 100,000 characters as intact as any other post and probably simply rejects longer posts.
My tool of choice is Hubzilla. And there’s hardly anything better in the Fediverse for what I do than Hubzilla.
They’re only indirectly. With that, I mean that Mastodon’s default limit of 500 characters is deeply engrained in Mastodon’s culture, and Mastodon’s culture is influenced by this limitation. For example, 500 characters make image descriptions in the post impossible. Thus, they’re not part of Mastodon’s culture. Thus, the very concept, the very idea is completely unimaginable to Mastodon users. Because as per Mastodon’s unwritten rules, “alt-text” and “image description” are mutually synonymous. They mean the exact same thing. Everything that describes the image goes into the alt-text, and that’s the way it is, full stop.
Hubzilla is meant for long texts. It has always been.
And Hubzilla is every bit as capable of long-form blogging as WordPress.
There’s no need to have one separate tool for each task if you already have one tool that can cover all these tasks. And Hubzilla can.
Here’s my most recent image post from yesterday.
60,000+ characters of full image description, my longest one so far. Plus precisely 1,500 characters of alt-text. And I actually had to limit myself in comparison to earlier posts. No detailed descriptions of images within the image. No transcripts of text on images within the image. No mentioning in the alt-text where exactly to find the full description.
And I’m trying to explain it to you.
Maybe it’s easier to experience first-hand, to see it with your own very eyes. Go through what appears on mastodon.social under certain hashtags and do so regularly for a few weeks or months:
Also, check the posts from @alttexthalloffame.
In the case of the image I’ve posted yesterday, and seeing as that post went out to general-purpose Mastodon instances and into the realm of Mastodon culture, definitely yes.
Oh, and in case you haven’t understood that yet because it’s so out-of-whack: I describe my images twice. One, a short description with no explanations in alt-text. Two, a full, detailed description with all necessary explanations in the post text body itself. The latter has to be even more detailed. And here’s my explanation why.
Alt-text rules for webdesign are halfway useless in social media.
And alt-text rules for webdesign, as well as alt-text rules for corporate American social media silos, are even more useless on Mastodon. Mastodon’s alt-text culture has nothing to do with that.
Again, I already do that with the full description.
But Mastodon insists, insists, insists in an actually descriptive image description in alt-text, no matter what. For one, out of principle. Besides, they can’t imagine there being an image description in the post text (which I hide behind a summary/content warning that they have to click to open first) because this is technically impossible on Mastodon.
So I have to describe the same image once more, this time in the alt-text, in addition to the full description in the post.
I can do that on Hubzilla. But Mastodon doesn’t support spoiler tags.
Most frontends for Mastodon collapse longer posts, the official Web interface as well as probably all third-party mobile apps, only the official mobile app doesn’t.
Content warnings which are the same as summaries on StatusNet/GNU social/Friendica/Hubzilla collapse posts, too, or rather hide them. I always give one of these when I post over 500 characters, so my image posts do collapse for just about everyone.
And once again, that’s what I already do. In addition to the shorter description in the alt-text.
Thanks. I’ve learned a lot.
In the end I still don’t understand that specific culture. I’ve scrolled through a few of the hashtags and links you gave. Some of them I’d shorten to half the length. That some bubbles in an infographic have different color is completely useless information without telling what they’re trying to convey with the color and how that connects things. Other images I think they describe the details that are just fluff. Those details are irrelevant because they just set the atmosphere. Just say what the armosphere is, then. I think that’s making the text too long and all over the place. Making it difficult to focus on what’s really going on in the picture, what’s important, because there’s so much noise added.
But some of the descriptions are really next level good. I wouldn’t have expected that. I think I need some more time to familiarize myself with that culture. I can’t tell if it’s some people being ultra good at it and some people mimicking it without really understanding its purpose… Or it’s me not grasping the concept / culture.
If you say you’re already adding a concise description and a long one and adding that to the body text… Seems I’ve arrived with my reasoning somwhere near what you’ve already been doing.
I see now why you’d like to talk about the Fediverse as you originally said. Seems to me like a matter of the Fediverse not interconnecting the way you’d need it to. And I see a fundamental problem here. I got that you’re using Hubzilla. But we’ve got to think about the perspective of a Mastodon user as long as most of your audience is there. And that platform is meant for short chunks of text. The whole platform and interface is designed to cater to that. And you’re doing long blog posts. There is a fundamental split between the two. Yet the platforms interconnect. I don’t see a way to make messages short and long at the same time. And the Fediverse is about connecting a diverse set of platforms. There is bound to be some difficulty and I don’t know if there is a good solution.
And your perspective might be a bit spoiled. Since you’re on Hubzilla and that’s meant for a wide variety of tasks. And Mastodon on the other side is meant to narrow things down to the use-case of microblogging… It’s kind of per design that your content falls through in the process of narrowing it down. And lot’s of Fediverse platforms are meant for one task only. Either pictures or videos or threaded conversations like here. That also doesn’t translate to other platforms and looks weird on Mastodon. The users of “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla or Friendica etc get it all. But then it get’s problematic when interconnecting to users of “narrower” platforms. It’s always been that way. And I don’t see a way around that. At least fundamentally.
And this manifests in the smaller issues you’re having. Like alt-text and culture that’s different amongst platforms. It’s all consequence of connecting diverse places. With your added explanation, I think I’ve now homed in on your issue…
Lemmy seems to be the wrong place to discuss it. I don’t see the users here have and particular knowledge about such topics. And Lemmy doesn’t federate in any unique way that’d make it stand out concerning this. It’s a good place for discussion, though. Mastodon’s choice to narrow down social media is valid. So if they like not to have long text, it’s their choice. And I applaud them for developing their own culture. I’m not sure if there is a good place to discuss this. Maybe within the “all-in-one” platforms like Hubzilla. You’re bound to find more people with the same struggles there. But you also want to reach us and the Mastodon users. I mean these places are also about linking external content and blog posts. So linking a Hubzilla blog post starting a discussion about this is the best thing I can come up with. But you need to lay down the groundworks properly. I mean it also took me several back and forths to understand the core of the issue. And it’s kind of a niche topic in a niche. So brace for little engagement or interest.
By professional Web design standards, you’re right. But this is part of Mastodon’s culture, too: detailed image descriptions that nobody would ever put on a Web site. As long as more people praise than directly criticise it, this won’t change.
The people who introduced alt-text to Mastodon and cultivated its alt-text culture were complete amateurs on smartphones who wanted to do something good for blind or visually-impaired users so that they can participate, too. And not professional Web designers who live and breathe WCAG 2.2.
Yes, I do, and I gave you a link as proof. If you don’t know how to access alt-text, and you’re on a computer, then hover your mouse cursor steadily above the image, and the alt-text will appear.
Exactly this is how Mastodon tries to force its culture upon the whole rest of the Fediverse. For example, this is how Mastodon tries to force Friendica to abandon its own culture which is six years older than Mastodon’s culture and adopt Mastodon’s culture instead.
“We’re the majority, so we get to decide how things are done! This is our territory, our Fediverse now!”
If Lemmy had better federation with Mastodon, Mastodon would try to do the same thing with Lemmy.
In other words, the whole Fediverse should succumb to both technological limitations/limitations in concept and cultural limitations on Mastodon. If Mastodon can’t do it, or if Mastodon users don’t like it, users of Pleroma and Akkoma and Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Sharkey and Friendica and Hubzilla etc. etc. pp. must not make use of it.
In which way should Mastodon adjust itself to the technology and culture of non-Mastodon projects? And do you honestly believe Mastodon would actually do any of that?
Speaking of technological limitations on Mastodon, I have pretty few to worry about.
If I post 60,000+ characters, Mastodon display the very self-same 60,000+ characters. No problem.
If I put 1,500 characters into the alt-text, Mastodon takes over all 1,500 characters. No problem. That is, if I write more, they’re truncated, but Misskey and its forks does the same.
If I put a Mastodon-style content warning into the summary field, Mastodon users get their content warning. No problem.
It’s only inline images that are a bit of a problem. Hubzilla has to turn a copy of the image into a file attachment and also copy the alt-text from the image embedding code into the attached image file so that Mastodon has at least got one way to show the image. But still, Mastodon gets the image, and Mastodon gets the alt-text.
Well, then there isn’t any place at all in the Fediverse or on the Web where I can go and ask e.g. whether illegible text in an image that I can read just fine at the source must, may or mustn’t be transcribed when writing an image description for a Fediverse post. There’s no such place at all.
Nope. What few Hubzilla users know Mastodon’s culture despise it deeply because Mastodon is trying to force it upon them. The vast majority of Hubzilla’s users knows nothing about Mastodon’s culture.
Also, I’m very very likely the only Hubzilla user who puts alt-text on images. And I’m definitely the only Hubzilla user who adds a long, detailed image description in the post itself on top.
Hubzilla’s culture doesn’t know accessibility, and it doesn’t care. Same goes for Friendica. Friendica’s alt-text handling is actually buggy, but the only Friendica user who even only tries to write alt-text apparently doesn’t know how to file a bug report on a Git repository.
In fact, throughout the Fediverse, Mastodon is the only project for whose users alt-text and image descriptions are really serious business. For people everywhere else, it’s largely a stupid gimmick or completely unknown.
I’ve learned that much. If I want to discuss something concerning Mastodon someplace else than Mastodon, I’ll first have to explain how Mastodon works and how Mastodon deviates from what people are used to where I post. Then I’ll have to explain Mastodon’s user community, who they are in general, where they came from, how most of them are tech-illiterates on phones, and half of them think Mastodon is the Fediverse. Then I’ll have to explain Mastodon’s culture and give a few links to demonstrate it.
Since all this would be tl;dr, I’d have to explain it by and by and in such ways that my explanations are remembered by the other users.
Then and only then I can ask for advice. That is, probably not even then because all advice I could expect would be 100% based on information that I myself have provided, and I’d be none the wiser.