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I love when folks posting photos include #alttext. I love it even more when they go a little extra and include descriptions beyond a bare minimum—scenic view from one mountain to another—and I hate to be a nag but I’d love it even more if folks included even a few details, like location, directional orientation, maybe even a bit about the circumstances. I like to try and do this—with spotty consistency I’m afraid—especially with my #silentSunday posts.
I've been trying to do this with the pictures I post on the #BostonPhotos hashtag, where I try to include details that describe the experience of looking at the image as well.
I'm sure the automated AI describers help low-to-no vision Mastodoners immensely, but I wish there was some tag we could add to indicate that we're trying to do a bit more with our #AltText. "Hand made artisanal AltText", though funny, is a bit too much, I think.
@jztusk Plus, depending on your home instance, and your own wordiness that’s 28 characters less for description that might be critical. I have had a couple times when I overran the 1500 ch limit on an alt text.
Hmmm, l never thought about whether or not AltText counts towards the character limit.
I guess I'm pretty terse in the body of the toot when posting photos, so I haven't bumped up against it.
@jztusk I vaguely recall reading somewhere that alt text counts but URLs don’t, or maybe don’t get counted character by character, I think they get stored with some abbreviated version. But don’t quote me on that.
A "short", purely visual description in the alt-text, also to satisfy the alt-text police and the Mastodon HOA who demand there be an alt-text for all images, no matter what.
And a long, detailed description that includes all explanations, and that goes into the post.
Yes, it will exceed 500 characters. But if you regularly have to describe that much, it's best to move someplace with a much higher character limit. Spreading a long description across multiple Mastodon toots can only be a short-term kluge.
Misskey offers you hard-coded 3,000 characters. All its forks have configurable character limits which tend to be higher. Akkoma offers you at least 5,000 characters. Friendica offers you 200,000 characters, but adding alt-text isn't as straight-forward as on Mastodon.
The limit I have here on Hubzilla is even higher; I don't know how high it is, but it doesn't really matter because AFAIK Mastodon rejects all posts from outside with over 100,000 characters.
But I don't post images here anymore because Hubzilla cannot make Mastodon blank out sensitive images. I have two channels for images on (streams) now which can make Mastodon hide images, @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet and @Jupiter's Fedi-Memes on (streams). (streams) has a fixed character limit of over 24,000,000 that's defined by database field size.
That is, I rarely post images nowadays. Explaining my Fediverse memes is tedious enough already. But properly describing and explaining my original virtual world images so that everyone gets them takes up so much time and energy (one image post always takes up several hours, and I touch-type on a hardware keyboard) that there are practically always months between two image posts.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #Akkoma #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #CharacterLimit #CharacterLimits #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta