I'm trying to find more accounts that are committed to using alt text and only sharing things with it as well. I checked the #accessibility hashtag, and that wasn't helpful. It's all tech stuff.
I don't want to be an advocate. I just want to have a good and equal experience online and chat with people who care about if their followers can participate or not.
I feel very alone in this, and because I'm not #blind, just vision impaired, I don't seem to fit in anywhere.
I do make sure that I boost things with alt-text only, although very occasionally I make an exception when the photo isn't related, and from a link that will contain a description, like it's a stock photo with a news story. (But I'm a stressful person to follow, since I kind of use Mastodon as my reading list for what's going on with my own oppression - I'm trans and we're not ok right now 🙃)
@nocontexttrek happy sigh.... #altTextAwards nod for just lovely storytelling within the description, capturing ALL dah vibes. For some reason I wanna say: yeah, groovy, baby!
I just read that the new ME/CFS document that I posted about yesterday ("Diagnosis and Management of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome") is in the top one percent most shared of all Mayo Clinic publications!
And it's only been available for less than a week!
My new project, https://AltTextHallOfFame.org, is a celebration of the effort, ingenuity, and creativity that goes into making the web a friendlier and more inclusive place, one captioned image at a time.
@stefan
If I can suggest something:
We have been using #AltTextAwards to signal good descriptions, maybe adding a section with the awards for the day / month?
#altTextAwards is a totally made up thing where we just cheer on some excellent descriptive text - for: terse but effective, poetic, funny, just well executed...
So far it has mostly been me, but I am definitely not the adjudicator of such things. If you see #altText that makes you go NICE! Then drop the tag and say so. 💖
@nathanlovestrees We just made it up today! But I like it. I weirdly enjoy alt text so much, all the different styles and priorities, and I bet no one ever thinks that ⭐ boop is for their alt text, so we gotta shout dat out. Egro, shout out to you, my friend!
"#Mastodon is failing" so hard that #Fediverse just crossed 4mln monthly active accounts (based on the-federation.info). :blobcatgiggle:
This is already slightly more than Nov and Dec #TwitterMigration waves' peaks. And it is still going up.
What I find particularly important is that it seems like a lot of this is not new accounts, but people returning to accounts created before and then left unused.
I expect this to be a more resilient kind of growth. Less of a drop after it peaks.
If #AltTextAwards are to be a thing, I would ask that they avoid categories that would incentivise people to create #AltText that is useless to people who actually need it.