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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. 🎉

cappelendamm.no/_drommenes-syk

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.

@eys @ruari

Wow, this is first time I've heard anyone mention this.

Is there some reason why JAWS does that? Seems a bit of a bad design for a screen reader, to leave out most of the text available?

125 characters is really short.

@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.

@eys

FediTips has moved!

@ruari @eys

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.

@eys @ruari

Yeah, good point! Maybe the difference in the way different tags are treated is a holdover from the days when alt texts were also used as visual placeholders for sighted people? (In the days when images loaded slowly or not at all...)

@feditips I now eagerly await a future post on best tips when alt texting from you. 😆

@eys

@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.

@eys

@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

github.com/ihabunek/toot

@eys

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. 🤷🏼

@ihabunek

@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.

@ihabunek

@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.

@ruari

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

gist.github.com/ruario/dcbb5a4

GistScript to post hourly (as binary emojis) to mastodon in UTCScript to post hourly (as binary emojis) to mastodon in UTC - binarytime.sh

@ruari

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 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.

@feditips I also use Toot in the same way to post DMs to myself with information I like to know about, like updates to other software I follow or decimal hour notifications (that was to help me get used to decimal time).

By posting though the fedi to my main account I get these messages as notifications to any machine I login to my fedi account with.

@feditips @ruari ops, it's deprecated yes! I have to admit i've never made use of it myself. But luckily, as it says, we can use aria-describedby, which when I think about it, I've seen more used.

@feditips @ruari Just be aware that there are still a lot of images not loading, often because of broken image URLs as a result of moving servers, or someone "cleaning up" a media library - deleting photos. Or javascript used to load, but the javascript is broken. Or a poor mobile connection. The list goes on…

The size cropping issue is dependent on how responsive the CSS is.