@jupiter_rowland
Just like, surprise, surprise, Mastodon's alt-text police is not blind.
I'm not "Mastodon's alt text police", I'm a human who thinks the text box will be misused, and is clunky to use for all sorts of people, authors included.
I believe that user-agents should make accessible all the metadata in a post, exactly because of the diversity of the Fediverse as software. Just like someone can make an object whose understanding depends on the exact date of posting, even backdating. Or an object that gets frequently edited. Or an object that is referenced by a sock-puppet account.
Except for professional Web accessibility experts, literally nobody on Mastodon seems to know what alt-text really is for.
Exactly. Most people (intersectionally even!) are not accessibility experts. At the very best they have some sense of "hey I should probably describe this image" since the text field is prominent, but virtually nobody will read an accessibility spec.
For my own example, as I cannot speak for others, I often add "impressionistic" details to the alt text of photos, just because the image itself can have qualities beyond just the objects contained in it. Which a sighted person will obviously perceive, even if maybe in a different way than I wrote down.
I think that's a very dogmatic view on the feature. Its a free text field, and if the internet taught us anything is that people will use free text fields for anything.
But let me tell you something: [long list of places that don't have an alt button]
Most of the services you listed rarely even have an useful alt text:
A lot of blog/static just plain don't;Corporate social media often has erroneous or incomplete machine-generated text with no machine-readable disclosure;Comics, famously XKCD, but many others I've met along the years, have absolutely unrelated alt text;
Let alone would have use for easy access to it. If anything Mastodon is the place where you can most reliably find useful alt text on the internet, by volume if not by ratio.
My character limit is over 30,000 times higher than on Mastodon.
No I don't think people put text in the alt box exclusively because of character limits, I've seen plenty of people, myself included, who put stuff there despite a generous limit on the instance.
I cannot speak to ableism or not, but I'm grateful that "people on the internet put the text, but on the wrong box" is the problems we get to discuss :)