Not trying to call out anyone in particular, I see a lot of people doing this, but I'm really curious and would like to understand this better.
Folks who use vague alt text with your images ("a funny book cover", "photo of me outside"), what is your thought process? Is the image description intended for sighted people? Or maybe your admin made alt text mandatory? Or maybe that really does seem sufficient.
Likewise, I don't think about describing or transcribing everything that's in a picture, rather, explaining the point of the picture, and why I'm sharing it.
If you share your photography, art, comics, or other visual work, consider adding a proper image description. This way, more of us can enjoy what you've made!
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.
My personal pro tip for writing good alt text: Before you post an image, think of someone you deeply care about. Your spouse. One of your parents, or kids. Your best friend.
Imagine that they suddenly lost their eyesight. How would you describe that image to them?
Hm. I wonder if I can get any fediverse admins onboard to disable all images on their instance on the World Sight Day in October, so that only alt text shows up.
Previously the alt text was only added as an alt attribute. I was hesitant to use the same text for the alt and title attributes, the way Mastodon does it.
"Imagine, for a moment, that your browser stopped showing you images. You would still see them referenced in articles, you’d read conversations about them, people making jokes.
So now, instead of 1,500 words of alt-text that conceal the image itself after it's published, we get alt-tag-nags that conceal the image itself before it's even posted