Iām asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application.
Iām looking for something
- in the Fediverse
- with technology that supports discussions
- where users know the Fediverse beyond whatever software that particular place is running on
- where users know something about how and why to make Fediverse posts accessible for e.g. blind users
- where users take this topic seriously instead of seeing it as a gimmick
- where itās likely enough for someone to reply to posts
Mastodon takes accessibility very seriously. But Mastodon users never look beyond Mastodon. Every other Mastodon user doesnāt even know that the Fediverse is more than only Mastodon. Most of those who do have no idea what the rest of the Fediverse is like, including what it can do that Mastodon canāt, and what it canāt do that Mastodon can. Many Mastodon users even reject the Fediverse outside Mastodon, and be it because it ārefusesā to fully adopt Mastodonās culture and throw its own cultures overboard. This would include using features that Mastodon doesnāt have. Youāre easily being muted or blocked upon first strike if you dare to post more than 500 characters at once.
I myself am mostly on Hubzilla. Not only is Hubzilla vastly more powerful than Mastodon, it is also vastly different, and being older than Mastodon as well, it had grown its own culture before Mastodon came along. Still, three out of four Mastodon users have never even heard of the existence of Hubzilla, and many who do are likely to think itās basically Mastodon with a higher character count, extra stuff glued on and a clunky UI.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Mastodon, you end up only discussing Mastodon accessibility with exactly zero regards, understanding or interest for what the rest of the Fediverse is like.
Besides, Mastodon has no good support for conversations and no real concept of threads. It is impossible to follow a discussion thread or to even only know that there have been new replies without having been mentioned in these replies. Thus, any attempt at discussing something on Mastodon is futile.
Hubzilla itself is great for discussions. It even has had groups/forums as a feature from the very beginning. In practice, however, it has precious few forums. The same applies to (streams) even more.
Discussing Fediverse accessibility is completely futile on both. They donāt ādo accessibilityā. To their users, alt-text is some fad that was invented on Mastodon, and Hubzilla and (streams) donāt do Mastodon crap, full stop. In fact, their users hate Mastodon with a passion for deliberately, intentionally being so limited and trying to push its own limitations, its proprietary, non-standard solutions and its culture upon the rest of the Fediverse. At the same time, they donāt really know that much about Mastodon, and they arenāt interested in it.
Most of this applies to Friendica as well, but Hubzilla and (streams) users sometimes go as far as disabling ActivityPub altogether to keep Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based microblogging projects out, and they donāt care if Friendica ends up collateral damage. They hate the non-nomadic majority of the Fediverse that much.
If you try to discuss Fediverse accessibility on Hubzilla, nobody would know what youāre even talking about, and nobody would want to know because they take it for another stupid Mastodon fad. They probably donāt even understand why I accept connection requests from Mastodon in the first place.
Here on Lemmy, Iāve seen a number of dedicated accessibility communities. But they seem to be only about accessibility on the greater Web and in real life and not a bit about accessibility in the Fediverse specifically. Iām not even sure if Lemmy itself ādoes accessibilityā in any way. And Iām not sure how aware Lemmy is of the Fediverse beyond Lemmy, /kbin and Mastodon.
Besides, these communities arenāt much more than the admin posting stuff and nobody ever replying. So I guess trying to actually discuss something there is completely useless. If I post a question, Iāll probably never get a reply.
The reason why Iām asking here first is because this community is actually active enough for people to reply to posts. But Iām not sure if itās good for discussing super-specific details about making non-Threadiverse Fediverse posts accessible.
Then allow me to make it less complicated. Or even more complicated.
It has never been my plan to post images with such massive descriptions on Lemmy. Lemmy doesnāt require image descriptions. It doesnāt require alt-text either. It doesnāt even officially support alt-text. Lemmy doesnāt live and enforce a culture of accessibility.
Most importantly, though: The OpenSim community has no subscribers on general-purpose Mastodon instances. Whatās posted there will most likely never appear in the federated timeline of e.g. mastodon.social where people could get all riled up about the lack of alt-text and image description.
Besides, the 13,000-character image description is outdated already. My image descriptions have grown since then. 25,000 characters, 40,000 characters, and yesterday, Iāve posted a 60,000-character description for an image that also got an alt-text precisely at Mastodonās limit of 1,500 characters.
**I donāt intend to post my images on Mastodon either.
I intend to keep posting them on Hubzilla (official website).**
Hubzilla has got nothing to do with Mastodon. It was first released in 2015, ten months before Mastodon. It was renamed and repurposed from the Red Matrix from 2012 which is a fork of Friendica from 2010.
Hubzilla is vastly different from Mastodon in just about everything. Like its predecessors, it has never had a character limit, and it has always had the full set of features of text formatting and post design as any full-blown long-form blogging platform out there. In fact, maybe even more than that.
Hubzilla is not a microblogging project. It can work as one, but it can seamlessly transition between microblogging and fully featured long-form blogging and everything in-between. Hubzilla is the Swiss army knife of the Fediverse, renamed from a fork of a Facebook alternative that was created also with blogging in mind.
So I want to post my images on Hubzilla.
What does this have to do with Mastodon then?
It has to do with Mastodon that Iāve got lots of Mastodon connections. All my OpenSim connections except for one are on Mastodon, and I think all of these are on one and the same OpenSim-themed instance. But on top of that, Iāve got hundreds of Mastodon connections all over the place, including mastodon.social and other big general-purpose instances.
And all those non-OpenSim Mastodon connections came to exist because they followed me. It was not my decision to follow them. They followed me because they expected me to explain the Fediverse beyond Mastodon to them because I had recently done so. Or they followed me because they had freshly arrived from Twitter, and they desperately needed Mastodon to feel like Twitter, including lots of uninteresting background noise in their personal timeline, so they followed everyone and everything they came across in the federated timeline.
So my image posts on Hubzilla will automatically federate to Mastodon and appear in peopleās Mastodon timelines. And it isnāt my decision.
Sure, on Hubzilla, I have the power to limit precisely who can see my posts by only sending them to specific connections. But I want the Fediverse world out there to see the marvels of OpenSim, to learn that free, decentralised 3-D virtual worlds have been reality since 2007, that āthe metaverseā is anything but dead and not invented by Zuckerberg. I donāt want to remain stuck in an echo chamber.
Oh, and by the way: Mastodon can receive posts up to a maximum length of 100,000 characters by default. Also, Mastodon does not truncate long posts. It only truncates alt-text that exceeds 1,500 characters. But it leaves posts up to 100,000 characters as intact as any other post and probably simply rejects longer posts.
My tool of choice is Hubzilla. And thereās hardly anything better in the Fediverse for what I do than Hubzilla.
Theyāre only indirectly. With that, I mean that Mastodonās default limit of 500 characters is deeply engrained in Mastodonās culture, and Mastodonās culture is influenced by this limitation. For example, 500 characters make image descriptions in the post impossible. Thus, theyāre not part of Mastodonās culture. Thus, the very concept, the very idea is completely unimaginable to Mastodon users. Because as per Mastodonās unwritten rules, āalt-textā and āimage descriptionā are mutually synonymous. They mean the exact same thing. Everything that describes the image goes into the alt-text, and thatās the way it is, full stop.
Hubzilla is meant for long texts. It has always been.
And Hubzilla is every bit as capable of long-form blogging as WordPress.
Thereās no need to have one separate tool for each task if you already have one tool that can cover all these tasks. And Hubzilla can.
Hereās my most recent image post from yesterday.
60,000+ characters of full image description, my longest one so far. Plus precisely 1,500 characters of alt-text. And I actually had to limit myself in comparison to earlier posts. No detailed descriptions of images within the image. No transcripts of text on images within the image. No mentioning in the alt-text where exactly to find the full description.
And Iām trying to explain it to you.
Maybe itās easier to experience first-hand, to see it with your own very eyes. Go through what appears on mastodon.social under certain hashtags and do so regularly for a few weeks or months:
Also, check the posts from @alttexthalloffame.
In the case of the image Iāve posted yesterday, and seeing as that post went out to general-purpose Mastodon instances and into the realm of Mastodon culture, definitely yes.
Oh, and in case you havenāt understood that yet because itās so out-of-whack: I describe my images twice. One, a short description with no explanations in alt-text. Two, a full, detailed description with all necessary explanations in the post text body itself. The latter has to be even more detailed. And hereās my explanation why.
Alt-text rules for webdesign are halfway useless in social media.
And alt-text rules for webdesign, as well as alt-text rules for corporate American social media silos, are even more useless on Mastodon. Mastodonās alt-text culture has nothing to do with that.
Again, I already do that with the full description.
But Mastodon insists, insists, insists in an actually descriptive image description in alt-text, no matter what. For one, out of principle. Besides, they canāt imagine there being an image description in the post text (which I hide behind a summary/content warning that they have to click to open first) because this is technically impossible on Mastodon.
So I have to describe the same image once more, this time in the alt-text, in addition to the full description in the post.
I can do that on Hubzilla. But Mastodon doesnāt support spoiler tags.
Most frontends for Mastodon collapse longer posts, the official Web interface as well as probably all third-party mobile apps, only the official mobile app doesnāt.
Content warnings which are the same as summaries on StatusNet/GNU social/Friendica/Hubzilla collapse posts, too, or rather hide them. I always give one of these when I post over 500 characters, so my image posts do collapse for just about everyone.
And once again, thatās what I already do. In addition to the shorter description in the alt-text.
Thanks. Iāve learned a lot.
In the end I still donāt understand that specific culture. Iāve scrolled through a few of the hashtags and links you gave. Some of them Iād shorten to half the length. That some bubbles in an infographic have different color is completely useless information without telling what theyāre trying to convey with the color and how that connects things. Other images I think they describe the details that are just fluff. Those details are irrelevant because they just set the atmosphere. Just say what the armosphere is, then. I think thatās making the text too long and all over the place. Making it difficult to focus on whatās really going on in the picture, whatās important, because thereās so much noise added.
But some of the descriptions are really next level good. I wouldnāt have expected that. I think I need some more time to familiarize myself with that culture. I canāt tell if itās some people being ultra good at it and some people mimicking it without really understanding its purposeā¦ Or itās me not grasping the concept / culture.
If you say youāre already adding a concise description and a long one and adding that to the body textā¦ Seems Iāve arrived with my reasoning somwhere near what youāve already been doing.
I see now why youād like to talk about the Fediverse as you originally said. Seems to me like a matter of the Fediverse not interconnecting the way youād need it to. And I see a fundamental problem here. I got that youāre using Hubzilla. But weāve got to think about the perspective of a Mastodon user as long as most of your audience is there. And that platform is meant for short chunks of text. The whole platform and interface is designed to cater to that. And youāre doing long blog posts. There is a fundamental split between the two. Yet the platforms interconnect. I donāt see a way to make messages short and long at the same time. And the Fediverse is about connecting a diverse set of platforms. There is bound to be some difficulty and I donāt know if there is a good solution.
And your perspective might be a bit spoiled. Since youāre on Hubzilla and thatās meant for a wide variety of tasks. And Mastodon on the other side is meant to narrow things down to the use-case of microbloggingā¦ Itās kind of per design that your content falls through in the process of narrowing it down. And lotās of Fediverse platforms are meant for one task only. Either pictures or videos or threaded conversations like here. That also doesnāt translate to other platforms and looks weird on Mastodon. The users of āall-in-oneā platforms like Hubzilla or Friendica etc get it all. But then it getās problematic when interconnecting to users of ānarrowerā platforms. Itās always been that way. And I donāt see a way around that. At least fundamentally.
And this manifests in the smaller issues youāre having. Like alt-text and culture thatās different amongst platforms. Itās all consequence of connecting diverse places. With your added explanation, I think Iāve now homed in on your issueā¦
Lemmy seems to be the wrong place to discuss it. I donāt see the users here have and particular knowledge about such topics. And Lemmy doesnāt federate in any unique way thatād make it stand out concerning this. Itās a good place for discussion, though. Mastodonās choice to narrow down social media is valid. So if they like not to have long text, itās their choice. And I applaud them for developing their own culture. Iām not sure if there is a good place to discuss this. Maybe within the āall-in-oneā platforms like Hubzilla. Youāre bound to find more people with the same struggles there. But you also want to reach us and the Mastodon users. I mean these places are also about linking external content and blog posts. So linking a Hubzilla blog post starting a discussion about this is the best thing I can come up with. But you need to lay down the groundworks properly. I mean it also took me several back and forths to understand the core of the issue. And itās kind of a niche topic in a niche. So brace for little engagement or interest.
By professional Web design standards, youāre right. But this is part of Mastodonās culture, too: detailed image descriptions that nobody would ever put on a Web site. As long as more people praise than directly criticise it, this wonāt change.
The people who introduced alt-text to Mastodon and cultivated its alt-text culture were complete amateurs on smartphones who wanted to do something good for blind or visually-impaired users so that they can participate, too. And not professional Web designers who live and breathe WCAG 2.2.
Yes, I do, and I gave you a link as proof. If you donāt know how to access alt-text, and youāre on a computer, then hover your mouse cursor steadily above the image, and the alt-text will appear.
Exactly this is how Mastodon tries to force its culture upon the whole rest of the Fediverse. For example, this is how Mastodon tries to force Friendica to abandon its own culture which is six years older than Mastodonās culture and adopt Mastodonās culture instead.
āWeāre the majority, so we get to decide how things are done! This is our territory, our Fediverse now!ā
If Lemmy had better federation with Mastodon, Mastodon would try to do the same thing with Lemmy.
In other words, the whole Fediverse should succumb to both technological limitations/limitations in concept and cultural limitations on Mastodon. If Mastodon canāt do it, or if Mastodon users donāt like it, users of Pleroma and Akkoma and Misskey and Firefish and Iceshrimp and Sharkey and Friendica and Hubzilla etc. etc. pp. must not make use of it.
In which way should Mastodon adjust itself to the technology and culture of non-Mastodon projects? And do you honestly believe Mastodon would actually do any of that?
Speaking of technological limitations on Mastodon, I have pretty few to worry about.
If I post 60,000+ characters, Mastodon display the very self-same 60,000+ characters. No problem.
If I put 1,500 characters into the alt-text, Mastodon takes over all 1,500 characters. No problem. That is, if I write more, theyāre truncated, but Misskey and its forks does the same.
If I put a Mastodon-style content warning into the summary field, Mastodon users get their content warning. No problem.
Itās only inline images that are a bit of a problem. Hubzilla has to turn a copy of the image into a file attachment and also copy the alt-text from the image embedding code into the attached image file so that Mastodon has at least got one way to show the image. But still, Mastodon gets the image, and Mastodon gets the alt-text.
Well, then there isnāt any place at all in the Fediverse or on the Web where I can go and ask e.g. whether illegible text in an image that I can read just fine at the source must, may or mustnāt be transcribed when writing an image description for a Fediverse post. Thereās no such place at all.
Nope. What few Hubzilla users know Mastodonās culture despise it deeply because Mastodon is trying to force it upon them. The vast majority of Hubzillaās users knows nothing about Mastodonās culture.
Also, Iām very very likely the only Hubzilla user who puts alt-text on images. And Iām definitely the only Hubzilla user who adds a long, detailed image description in the post itself on top.
Hubzillaās culture doesnāt know accessibility, and it doesnāt care. Same goes for Friendica. Friendicaās alt-text handling is actually buggy, but the only Friendica user who even only tries to write alt-text apparently doesnāt know how to file a bug report on a Git repository.
In fact, throughout the Fediverse, Mastodon is the only project for whose users alt-text and image descriptions are really serious business. For people everywhere else, itās largely a stupid gimmick or completely unknown.
Iāve learned that much. If I want to discuss something concerning Mastodon someplace else than Mastodon, Iāll first have to explain how Mastodon works and how Mastodon deviates from what people are used to where I post. Then Iāll have to explain Mastodonās user community, who they are in general, where they came from, how most of them are tech-illiterates on phones, and half of them think Mastodon is the Fediverse. Then Iāll have to explain Mastodonās culture and give a few links to demonstrate it.
Since all this would be tl;dr, Iād have to explain it by and by and in such ways that my explanations are remembered by the other users.
Then and only then I can ask for advice. That is, probably not even then because all advice I could expect would be 100% based on information that I myself have provided, and Iād be none the wiser.