You know... We talk and talk about boycotting big corporations and using 0 AI etc, how about a boycott on people that don't add #AltText? Anyone with me?
I have mentioned it in song, in fictional stories, and in guides.
It’s not negotiable.
Posting images without AltText will get you blocked.
Not by me - to this day I have yet to block anyone - but there is a significant portion of the Fediverse that will block you forever if you publicly post a single image without AltText.
I don’t necessarily agree that one single transgression should result in excommunication from the Fediverse. I, myself, learned about the existence AltText here on the Fediverse. I’ve since had conversations about the importance of AltText with people that need it. Adding AltText to every single image you post is a learned skill. It’s also an exercise in mindfulness and awareness of accessibility for all.
It’s a defining aspect of the community here, that people feel so strongly about #AltText on the grounds of inclusivity, to the point where not including it is considered a sin against the entire community - and an insult to John Mastodon himself.
So make the effort, because people generally don’t let you know that they’re blocking you. Otherwise, your Fediverse might start to just sort of shrink around you and squeeze all the social out of your network.
Everyone kept asking, So i finally made it. Generate alt-text for your images programmatically, perfect for photographers, bloggers, and developers who upload lots of images.
Pay what you can ($5 minimum)
What you get: Unlimited API access for a month (up to 5,000 images)
API key sent to your email automatically within minutes!
You can get a Subscription, set it and forget it, which auto-renews monthly. Or do a One-time purchase, no commitment, buy when you need it.
(You can check your remaining time via the API if you go the one-time route!)
@🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 In general, when it comes to what to include in an image description, the context matters. But so does the target audience (not as in whom you want to receive your content, but who may stumble upon it this or that way), and so does the existing knowledge of the target audience. And, this is pretty much Fediverse-specific, so do the expectations of your target audience.
I've observed and studied alt-text and image descriptions for some three years now, not only by reading dozens upon dozens of guides all over the Web, but especially by examining the attitude towards it in the Fediverse, that is, actually only on Mastodon because alt-text isn't such a hot topic anywhere else. I've mostly done so in order to up my own image-describing game further and further and further, also because no alt-text guide out there covers my situation, so I had to cobble all that information together myself, enough information for me to have started my own wiki on this topic to share my knowledge with others.
One thing I've noticed is that Mastodon loves long and extensive image descriptions in alt-text. There's no "keep it short and concise"; instead, there are users who keep receiving praise for alt-texts of 800 or 1,000 characters or more.
Also, my impression is that Mastodon does not like having to ask for details and/or explanations, nor does it like to look up what it doesn't know enough about to understand it. If you have to ask someone who has posted an image for a description of a certain detail in an image, this means that the image description is lacking, regardless of whether or not that detail matters within the context of the post. Having to ask for a description of a detail is almost as bad as having to ask for the description of the whole image.
In fact, it was just a few months ago that I read a Mastodon toot that said that any element in an image mentioned in the description must also have its own visual description. You can't just say what's in the image. You also have to describe what it looks like.
Likewise, if there's something in an image description that someone doesn't understand, it must be explained right away. This, by the way, ties in with the rule that image descriptions must never use technical language or jargon, and if they absolutely cannot avoid it, it must be explained when it's used first. And it must be explained in a way that requires no prior special knowledge.
So far, so good. But the reason why I've gone all the way to observe and study alt-text and image descriptions, and why I'm so obsessed with it, is because I'm in a special situation.
For one, I'm in the Fediverse which means that certain alt-text rules simply don't apply to me, not only everything that involves captions, but also the brevity-as-a-hard-requirement rule. However, I'm not on Mastodon, so I'm not as much bound to Mastodon's limitations as Mastodon users. In particular, my character limit is over 16 million, so I can do a whole lot more in the post itself.
Besides, my original images are nothing like what almost everyone on Mastodon posts. They aren't real-life photographs, nor are they social media screenshots. Instead, they are renderings from 3-D virtual worlds, even extremely obscure virtual worlds that next to nobody out there has ever even heard of.
At the same time, my image posts might get people curious enough that they want to go explore this new universe that they've just discovered through my post. The only way they can explore it is by looking at my images and taking in all the big and small details. If they're blind, they cannot do that, but accessibility and inclusion demand they have the very same chance to do it as fully sighted people. In order for them to have this chance, I must go and describe all these big and small details to them, regardless of context. Everything else would be ableist, maybe not by some official W3C definition, but at least by Mastodon's definition.
Speaking of context, sometimes my images are the context of the post. There isn't that one element in the image that matters within the context of the post while everything else can be swept under the rug. No, the entire image matters. The entire scenery matters. Everything in the image matters all the same. This means that I have to describe everything. Again, see further above: I can't get away with just mentioning what's there. If I mention it, I have to describe what it looks like.
This is also justified because I can never expect everyone to already know what something in my image looks like. Again, they don't show real life. They show virtual worlds. In virtual worlds, things do not necessarily look like what they look like in real life. And things tend to look different in different virtual worlds, sometimes even within the same virtual world system.
For example, you, as someone born completely blind, may have come across enough image descriptions to have a rough idea of what cats look like in real life. But that does not automatically give you a realistic idea what a particular cat looks like in a specific virtual world, also seeing as there are infinitely more possibilities for what cats may look like. It could be a detailed, life-like representation of a cat with high-resolution materials as textures. It could be a very simplified, low-resolution model with a likewise low-resolution texture. It could be cobbled together from standard shapes because that was all that was possible when that cat was made. Or whatever. You wouldn't know unless I told you. But who am I to judge whether or not you want to know?
It gets even worse with buildings. You probably wouldn't even know what a specific building looks like in real life unless you have a detailed description, so how are you supposed to know what a specific building looks like in a virtual world that you've first read about a few minutes ago? In addition, there are so many ways of creating buildings in virtual worlds, and they've changed over time with new tools and new features becoming available.
I've come to a point at which I usually avoid having buildings in my images because they're too tedious to describe, especially realistic buildings, but not only these. My last original image post but one was in spring, 2024, about one and a half years ago. I decided to show a rather fantasy-like building. This building, however, is so complex that it took me two full days, morning to evening, to write the long image description that I'd put into the post. This image description is over 60,000 characters long, over 40,000 of which describe the building. The description also covers the interior because the outer walls of the building are almost entirely glass. The long description has two levels of headlines of its own. I've needed well over 4,000 characters only to explain to people where that place is that's shown in the image.
And then there was the short description for the alt-text which I needed as well so that nobody could accuse me of not adding a sufficiently detailed alt-text to my image. I was genuinely unable to make it any shorter than 1,400 characters. It actually took up a lot of characters that I needed to point especially Mastodon users at the long description in the post itself. That was when Mastodon only hid the post text behind a CW, but not the images, so that nobody on Mastodon would have known that there's a long description unless I told them in the alt-text.
One reason why the long description grew so long was that I didn't describe the image by looking at the image. I described it by looking at the real deal. All the time while I was working on the long description, I was in-world. I had my avatar in front of the building, walking through the building, walking around the building. I could move the camera very close to a lot of details. Instead of seeing the scenery at the resolution of the image, I saw it at a practically infinite resolution. This also enabled me to transcribe text that's so small in the image that it's unreadable, even text that's so tiny in the image that it's invisible. After all, the rule says that any and all text within the borders of an image must be transcribed. And I've yet to see that rule having any explicit exception for unreadable text.
Sure, I could have written that certain details got lost and cannot be identified at the low resolution of the image. But that may be perceived as me trying to weasel out of the responsibility to describe these details instead. I mean, how many people who were born completely blind have a concept of image resolution and pixels, and how many think that it's possible to zoom into any image infinitely? Besides, I'm not bound to what the image shows at its fairly low resolution anyway, so why should I pretend I am? The only logical reason for that would be because I'm expected to describe the image. And not the scenery in the area within the borders of the image.
And still, I haven't given full visual descriptions of everything in that scene. I decided against fully describing all images within that image at the same level as the image itself. I decided so because it would have gone too far: At least one image, a preview image on a teleporter, technically shows dozens of images itself, preview images on teleporters again. And some of these images show more images yet again. I would have ended up describing several dozens of images, at least four levels deep, in order to fully describe one image. And then the whole image description would have been rather pointless because Mastodon rejects posts with over 100,000 characters, and the post would probably have ended up with several millions of characters.
By the way, even before I wrote that massive image description, I actually showed @Hat. AuDHD cat 😷n95🍉 💔🌻🔻 one of my image posts, the one with my longest description for a single image to that date. It has two images with over 48,000 characters of long description combined, almost 40,000 of which are for the first image. She actually praised this massive image description and told me that this level of detail in both visual description and explanation is exactly what she needs.
The last time I've posted original in-world images was in July, 2024. I took care not to have too many details in the images this time. Still, I ended up with a combined over 25,000 characters of long description for both images, also because they contain an avatar that had to be described in full detail.
I've been working on the image descriptions for a series of avatar portraits for about a year now, on and off, but still. This time, I gave the images a neutral, completely feature-less, bright white background that won't take up much effort to describe. The plan is to have three or four images with three or four portraits of the same avatar each, always in the same post with only slightly different outfits. I'm still describing the first image, and I've only fully covered the first outfit and started with the second one.
The common preamble for all images in one post already exceeds 17,000 characters, including over 2,000 characters explaining OpenSim and over 9,000 characters explaining what OpenSim avatars can be made of and how they work because that's essential for understanding the visual descriptions. I expect the preamble to grow significantly longer before it's ready because I have to get rid of a whole lot of technical language and jargon and/or explain even more of it. The preamble also contains over 5,000 characters of general visual description that applies to all portraits in all images the same. It includes almost 2,000 characters that describe the shoes, men's casual leather shoes, because to my best knowledge, such shoes don't exist in real life.
Other images will show the avatar wearing full brogue leather shoes. I'm still not sure whether I can correctly assume that everyone out there knows what they are and what they look like, or whether I'll have to give the same amount of detail description again, only that full brogue shoes are much more complex than the shoes I've already described. Also, I'm not sure if everyone out there knows what a herringbone fabric pattern looks like, or whether that requires a detail description and an explanation itself, even though several actually blind users have told me that I can assume it to be familiar.
One problem I still haven't solved is that I simply can't fit an appropriately detailed short image description into a maximum of 1,500 characters of alt-text.
Verdict: There are always edge cases in which an image cannot be sufficiently described in only one short and concise image description in the alt-text. My virtual world renderings are such an edge case, also because they're posted into the Fediverse. Another edge case is @Hat. AuDHD cat 😷n95🍉 💔🌻🔻 who, due to a disability, requires hyper-detailed image descriptions that take hours to read to even be able to experience and understand an image properly.
Poll only for #Blind/LowVision users who rely on #AltText. Is AltText generated with an LLM actually “better than nothing” as some argue? Please comment if you’re Blind or Low Vision, and please boost to get a good sample.
Could someone who uses a text reader tell me if when I post a link and it throws up an image do you see a blank image or does it not register the link image at all. When I post a link and it throws up an image I try to give a link image description in my post. It’s usually the header image of the linked article & I check to see if the article gave alt text for the image. If they did, I just note that. Thanks #AltText #Alt4You #TextReader .
“When the darkness fell on blue In the year of twenty-two The chanting started to ring true The call went out to me and you Join Mastodon Join Mastodon
How could they have ever known Their words were forming sacred tones The ancient forces in the stone The summoning of flesh and bone John Mastodon John Mastodon
John Mastodon, they love their mum They have alt-text written on The tattoo on their arm Of a hairy pachyderm John Mastodon John Mastodon
Join Mastodon x8
The chants grew loud as we watched on The coming of the chosen one They emerged triumphant from The ancient portal of Gargron John Mastodon John Mastodon
Linking people across the earth They lead them to the Fediverse Their admin army show their worth Shouting loudly in their mirth Join Mastodon Join Mastodon
John Mastodon, they’re the one Who takes the corporate socials on They give their code to everyone For every platform you might run John Mastodon Join Mastodon
Join Mastodon x8
Sweating blood and guts and tears And fighting bots and billionaires An artist and engineer With indie songs in his ears John Mastodon John Mastodon
Ditch the birds and book of faces Leave behind the corporations. Tooting old computer cases Open source on all our bases Join Mastodon Join Mastodon
John Mastodon knows all the tricks Of every distro of Linux They stay engaged in politics They fought an army of Fediverse chicks John Mastodon John Mastodon”
They say a picture is worth 1000 words. I don't know that any picture can be well-described with only a few. Thank you for using alt text. Now please make sure your alt text is actually descriptive. Thanks. #AltText
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.
Newcomers: I’m not going to yell at you about alt text.
But I will tell you, just as a factual matter, if you don’t add alt text to your images they may get fewer faves and boosts. There are people here who rely on it to know what you’ve posted, and many more who won’t engage with media that doesn’t have alt text.
Section508.gov is the official U.S. government resource for ensuring digital accessibility compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d).
I just learned that I need to put alt text on URLs for more accessible PDFs, but -- what should it say?
I am formatting academic citations that include a URL, so all the information about where that link will take you is in the text. I don't want it to read the URL to you and I don't want to just repeat the same information you just heard. What do you find most helpful in this situation?
Hey y'all, I'm starting an "ALT After Dark" account, inspired by the wonderful @alttexthalloffame! The goal would be to encourage good alt-text on NSFW image posts, as well as showcasing shining examples of spicy alt-text.
What are our goals? - Promote quality adult content that focuses on consent, community, and accessibility (great alt-text, proper CWs & hashtags) ❤️🔥 - Reduce the prevalence of porn-bot and repost accounts that post without subject consent, without alt-text or CWs, engage in hashtag spam, and lower the safety / enjoyment of folx on Fedi 🚫 - Engage positively with the community and generally be wholesome-ish 😉
How will we do it? - With well-vetted human volunteers. - By leading by example. - With the help if the community.
What do we need? - An ideal instance to host us. - An effort to make the Fediverse a better place. - Volunteers (of which we already have several).
To my fellow blind people: This is the month of AudioMo. If you will be participating and if you're one that benefits from #AltText on photos, take the time to reciprocate when posting your audio. Let's not have 'one rule for you, another for me' rule going on. Practice what we preach. If you benefit from alt-text, add it to your audio description. Many people benefit from knowing what the audio is before clicking on it. In the same way some images are NSFW, some of your audio might not be either. It may be loud, it may be noises of your pets which could cause pets at the other end to go wild and so on.
I made a similar tool for Mastodon (and a few other platforms), for those interested to give it a try!
https://data.stefanbohacek.com/projects/fediverse-post-accessibility
#AltText #accessibility #ImageDescription
Boosting Web Accessibility with Drupal CMS and AI DrupalCamp Ottawa, May 2, 2025 https://drupalcampottawa.com/en/sessions/schedule Web accessibility is a journey—and with the right tools, Drupal can help you get there faster.
Post a solid black square image with detailed alt text describing what would have been there. Everyone will "see" the same way screen reader users see the post! This powerful exercise demonstrates why accessible content matters.
How To Participate:
Choose a meaningful image based on the daily theme
Replace it with a plain black square in your post
Write a vivid, detailed description as the alt text
Not sure how to write good descriptions? We've created a comprehensive alt text guide at micr0.dev/alttext with examples, tips, and even an interactive quality checker!
You can also DM me the original image, and I'll help generate alt text you can use! (Make sure you are following me first! Mastodon blocks 'unsolicited' DMs!)
Example: Instead of "My cat" try "My orange tabby cat Whiskers lounging in a sunbeam on the windowsill, looking sleepy with half-closed eyes"
Daily Themes:
Monday: Nature & Outdoors
Tuesday: Pets & Animal Friends
Wednesday: Art & Creativity
Thursday: Food & Cuisine
Friday: Places & Spaces
Saturday: People & Portraits
Sunday: Wild Card (anything you choose!)
Duration
The challenge runs for one full week! Join in on any or all of the daily themes.
Community Showcase
I'll be boosting exceptional examples throughout the week and featuring creative descriptions. Your participation helps inspire others!
Supporting the Mission
If you find value in this challenge and want to support Altbot's continued development and accessibility work, you can contribute to the project at ko-fi.com/micr0byte. All funds go directly toward server costs, development, and expanding our accessibility initiatives. However, awareness and participation are the most important contributions!
Why This Matters
Every day, blind and low-vision people experience the Fediverse entirely through alt text. This challenge helps everyone understand why detailed image descriptions are so important first hand. Awareness is important!
The challenge begins today! Who's ready to make the Fediverse more accessible while trying something new? Make sure to tag three friends who you think should join in!
Oh boo hoo! Someone doesn't like the new alt text warning on Mastodon!
> This warning is extremely annoying, I wish I could get rid of it and be allowed to post images without alt text if I want to without being asked every time like every other website. I know it is not ideal for accessibility, but I'm not going to add alt text because the warning tells me too, I'm too busy already procrastinating my life in other ways.
With #117, Mastodon now allows users to add an alternative text to media in order to improve accessibility for visually impaired people. However, many people, including me, too often forget to do s...
REMINDER: Your resistance goes faster, harder, and further without the use of ableist language. Fascists won't give a fuck, but a whole lot of folk who have been called 'crazy’, ‘insane’, 'stupid’, ‘idiot’, ‘moron’, and so forth hear you every time you do this, and make themselves a little smaller.
The same goes for body-shaming of any kind. It hurts your allies, not your enemies.
I'm micr0, creator of @altbot, the open-source bot that helps generate alt-text for images on the Fediverse to make content more accessible.
What's New in 2.1?
After successfully moving image processing to local hardware with version 2.0, I've now brought video processing capability back - but with a major privacy upgrade! Altbot can now generate descriptions for videos completely locally and privately without sending content to Google or any other third-party services.
Important note: Currently, video processing is visual-only and doesn't include audio transcription. The audio processing Google was doing was some serious black magic fuckery that isn't possible to replicate locally with current technologies. But the visual descriptions are excellent and totally private!
With this update:
All processing happens locally with zero data retention
Complete privacy for all content
No data used for training models
Videos processed with the same privacy standards as images
I've also maintained Altbot's focus on energy efficiency - while video processing naturally requires more resources than images, I've implemented it to be as efficient as possible, keeping power consumption to a minimum while still delivering great results.
Thank You for Your Support!
I want to express my heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped me reach my donation goal on Ko-fi with the 2.0 launch! Your generosity made it possible to set up the local processing infrastructure that powers this privacy-focused service.
The response from the community has been incredible, and it means so much to know that privacy and accessibility are values we share.
What's Next for Altbot?
I'm already working on exciting future developments:
An Altbot API that will allow developers to integrate alt-text generation into their applications
Direct integration with Fediverse software platforms - I'm collaborating with instance developers to make accessibility a built-in feature!
Remember that Altbot has always been and remains fully open-source, with self-hosting being a core feature from day one for anyone who wants to run their own instance.
Supporting Ongoing Development & Infrastructure
Altbot currently runs on hardware in my home, which means I'm covering all the electricity costs for powering the GPU server that processes your media. While I've designed the system to be energy-efficient, running a dedicated AI server still impacts my monthly power bill.
Monthly donations would be especially helpful in sustainably supporting:
Ongoing electricity costs
Time spent on development and maintenance
Future infrastructure improvements
Even small recurring contributions can make a huge difference in keeping this service running reliably and allowing me to dedicate more time to improvements!
It might be worth pointing out that not only people with visual and/or auditory impairments benefit from #AltText. It can be useful in many other ways, too.
To me, as an #autistic person whose perception and information processing work in quite different ways, it is not always clear what the point of an image is. Some good alt text can help a lot.
Some clarifying background info in alt text can also be very useful for the general public (which helps to normalise the use of alt text).
A photo of part of a tower computer featuring a headphone jack, a knurled dial switch, and a 5-1/4" floppy disk drive. A large sticker on the computer proclaims: "REMEMBER Turn your computer off before midnight on 12/31/99 - BestBuy"
Hello. I just spat out my coffee. I'm #blind and your #alttext made me do it. Brilliant toot too. May I congratulate you especially on including "bum bouquet". Bowing. Grateful.
Get free access to over 60K cat images and breed information. A fully protected and authenticated API to instantly fill your website or app with cat content.
What do people think of this response to ‘generate detailed Alt Text’ by Gemini:
Here is some detailed alt text for the image you provided: Alt Text: A large, menacing grey cat, reminiscent of a monster, stands on its hind legs with its front paws raised. It has glowing yellow eyes and a wide, toothy grin. The cat is surrounded by a fiery aura as it emits a powerful beam of energy from its mouth. The beam is directed towards the Empire State Building in New York City, which is engulfed in flames. The city skyline is visible in the background, with tall buildings and smoke rising from the destruction. The overall tone of the image is chaotic and destructive, evoking a sense of fear and awe. Additional Notes: • You may want to adjust the description of the cat's appearance based on its specific characteristics. • If the image is part of a larger context (like a movie poster or book cover), you could add a brief reference to that context. • The alt text should be concise and informative, providing a clear description of the image without being overly detailed. Let me know if you have any other questions.
A couple years ago I opened a thread to add #AltText on #Mastodon banners and profile pictures. Now detailed todos are being posted. Is there anyone who could help in this case?
Pitch The banner and profile picts on the profile site has no ALT or ARIA tags. Blind people can't get information about the content of this images. Motivation Additional text information for image...
Even though I know #HTML inside out and use it virtually every day, I'm still reading #HTMLForPeople by @bw because it's a prime example of how a good guide should be written.
1. The book is simple and easy to follow, with relevant points explained well enough even for non-coders to understand. 2. Images are clearly described for #blind readers through the use of #AltText. 3. The website is easy to navigate with a #ScreenReader. 4. There are no annoying pop-ups or ads on the website. 5. The book is entirely free of charge.
