In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.
Well, convincing admins of big instances to get onboard with the idea is an uphill battle, as you'd expect.
So maybe something like regular folks posting descriptions of the images they'd normally upload instead of the images themselves could be a good, arguably less impactful alternative?
While this is a neat idea, on these two days, I'd like the #OpenSource community to work on on making adding/boosting/finding alt text on media easier so that it can have a lasting impact and not be performative. Maybe the two days would be fantastic days to work on long lasting code changes that make the #Fediverse more accessible beyond those two days? And also, read this. https://robertkingett.com/posts/5972/#Mastodon#Accessibility#Education@stefan
I think this should be left up to individual users, and not imposed on them by an instance admin. Sometimes it is urgent to send an image, and/or impossible to adequately describe an image in words.
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