Compassion ~ Thought

  • 3 Posts
  • 871 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 24th, 2024

help-circle









  • OpenStars@piefed.socialtocats@lemmy.worldPspspspsps
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    4 days ago

    I blame the tools. On Lemmy, unless you are using Tesseract, you typically cannot see the alt text unless the image fails to load or you have a specific tool to do so like an actual reader for the blind. For at least the past year I have always put alternative text onto every image I have posted, but using Firefox on Android and I have no easy way to even know if that text is there, e.g. to check spelling. In PieFed this is an active area of development, and e.g. alt text was added 9 months ago to the post creation page (roadmap) but I don’t know if Lemmy has any plans to ever show alt text to someone who is not blind (or has some other means to view that text).

    And even if it did, not all apps may make use of it. Therefore if these prolific posters can’t even see it themselves after they post something, I can well understand why they would feel like it is not worth the bother. The incentivization structure is just all wrong: it’s all cost to them and virtually no benefit, at least none that they can see for themselves, immediately. Someone would need to put in the requisite time and effort to make better tools, if we truly wanted this to change. However, I personally have given up on Lemmy every getting better at a reasonable rather than snail’s pace.

    And similarly Firefox as well. If the developers choose not to care about such issues, it sends a strong message to the users of those tools that the concept is unimportant.

    Something that people could do regardless that is an even better workaround than writing up alt text into image posts would be to copy and paste text rather than use screenshots. This offers so many advantages, including the ability to change font sizes and match whatever dark/light mode the user prefers at that moment, and be represented in whatever font face the user chooses, etc.