@Baethyn This first left me a little bit confused. Why would your screen reader read first the actual post text, then the alt-text of the image, then the full image description?
Yes, I have embedded the image in my original post. I'm on Hubzilla where this is as normal as posts with thousands or even tens of thousands of characters. Hubzilla is influenced by neither Twitter nor Mastodon.
But Mastodon would normally remove all traces of embedded images from posts including the alt-text. And Hubzilla always converts copies of all embedded images into file attachments, alt-text included, when sending a post via ActivityPub.
Your screen reader should normally only present to you the content warning plus the image with the alt-text. And when you open the content warning, your screen reader should read the post text and then immediately afterwards the full image description.
Then I realised that both tweesecake.social and dragonscave.space don't run vanilla Mastodon. They run Glitch. And while Glitch does remove embedded images from posts, it does not remove their alt-texts. You can't know that, but where your screen reader reads an alt-text within the post, there is no image. There is only the alt-text which Glitch has left in.
Still, the order in which I've composed the post, including both the image being embedded in the post and the length of the text before and after the image, is deliberate. Hubzilla is fully capable of long-form blogging with all bells and whistles, far beyond what Mastodon or Glitch can render. And as strange as this may sound to a Mastodon user, Hubzilla's culture does not rule out making use of these features.
Solving the second problem you've mentioned would require me to put the full image description before the actual post text. And everyone who comes across the post would first have to read or scroll through an hour worth of image description before they'd read what I actually want to say in the post.
In a sense, what I've posted is actually a blog post. I think the confusion might come from Mastodon users, including Glitch users, expecting everything in their timelines to be a native Mastodon toot.
Also, from what I've read elsewhere, having the image descriptions and all explanations in the very same place as the image itself is the most accessible way. It's much more convenient and less cumbersome than having to navigate elsewhere to get a description plus explanations. Replies in a thread already fall under "elsewhere".
Also, I do have the technical means of putting the full description into a separate document without even having to leave Hubzilla. But for one, that would be just as cumbersome and inconvenient. And besides, a while ago, a blind Mastodon user told me that Hubzilla articles apparently don't work in their screen reader. So I can't rely on them for accessibility purposes anyway.