Ever had a dream about a wonderful bike only to lose it?
This site has you covered… you are welcome.
One of my reports. No doubt @unimyra will understand the importance of this.
I should probably note that this site is associated with @erlendloe and his new book. I suspect the book with only be in Norwegian but much like Flexie-Belle's register, his Dream Bike Register is useable by all.
https://cappelendamm.no/_drommenes-sykkelregister-erlend-loe-9788202802042
EDIT: Ok I see my my alt text English translation is clipped (at least on hover for the Mastodon web interface). If you cannot speak Norwegian and want to read that entire summary (which you do!) use your translation service of choice on the link.
Ok, yes the full alt text is present apparently. I see it when I inspect the page with dev tools but does not display in its entirety for the tooltip.
@ruari Alt texts should ideally be kept under 125 characters; because JAWS (don’t know about other screen readers) will cut it off at that point. The longdesc attribute is recommended for longer descriptions. Of course, that’s not available in the UI most (any?!) places, so I reckon pasting the whole text in a follow-up toot is sort of a solution.
@feditips Yeah I need to think about this going forward. I often have long alt text and not just because I include a full copy of written words from a screenshot. Now I am thinking about how I should order things, so that the most relevant part is near the front, so when it is too long, they'll at least get something.
Have consulted and followed a number of blind users on here about best practice for posting, and never heard this ever mentioned.
I'm wondering if this is something that has entered web design circles a while ago and just stayed there as a rule?
I just dropped a message to a blind user who has helped me out a lot, I'll see what they have to say.
@feditips @ruari Thank you for investigating and clearing it up for us!
I've always worked with the assumption that alt texts should be short and precise - when it was first implemented in browsers it was to describe images rather than transcribe big blocks of screenshotted text
There's also the chance that when the alt text replaces a non-loading image, the text might get cut off depending on the width & height of the image it's replacing.
@feditips FWIW I do think a lot of sighted users do use the alt text as well. Images are sometimes deleted from caches on instances. In addition there are extentions and tools built into browsers (including Vivaldi) to prevent loading of images for various reasons. Here is my earlier post, which interestingly shows the entire alt text even though the toltip did not.
@feditips I also sometimes use @ihabunek's wonderful Toot TUI masto client from the terminal and appreciate the alt text greatly myself.
Here is my older post as an example
A side note @feditips since you write masto tips. Toot is really nice for automating posting from scripts. My @browserversiontracker and @vivaldiversiontracker are basically just short shell scripts powered by cURL to fetch information and Toot to post it.
With tools like these doing the heavy lifting simple info posting masto bots are pretty straightforward if you have basic command line skils.
You have probably written about these things before but I mention it nonetheless.
@ruari @browserversiontracker @vivaldiversiontracker @ihabunek
I've mentioned Toot as a command line app, didn't know about the script side of things. Thanks!
@feditips Well it just makes the posting part really simple as you can just pipe text into it from the command line. Here is a small excerpt from the shell script that posts the @vivaldiversiontracker information.
@feditips My "bots" (actually just automated posting) are tiny shell scripts run as cron jobs. At set intervals they use cURL to fetch information from the web, extract key values with tools like sed and grep and then post with Toot (if those values have changed since last time).
I know it is not for everyone but the barrier for entry is fairly low if someone is at all command line savvy.
Do you have a post about this somewhere I could link to?
@feditips I guess I could write a short blog post about it with maybe an example script.
@feditips I can tweak this old script that I used to use on my watch account that posted hourly updates of the time in binary as Christmas trees (lit and unlit).
Make it into something more useful and embed it in a blog post
https://gist.github.com/ruario/dcbb5a42df8590cb9bf61e846bba393e
Hahaha, I knew you would bring unusual watches into it
Even a quick blog post summarising what you've posted in this thread would do!
@feditips I mean it was that or unicycles…right!?
@feditips I will give a better example and not use binary, since adds an extra complication for people to understand.
Maybe a latest headline from your favourite new site or something sent to you hourly (if it changes). Or something along those lines. Nice and simple that people can relate to.
Doesnt have to be super useful directly, so long as they get the idea and can use it to make something useful for themselves.