My #1 feature suggestion for micro blog is a way to label photos when posting via the app.
Knowing that we have users who are blind, I feel a bit jerkish every time I post a non-labeled photo. 😉
@cheri This is a very good suggestion! It’s been a while since I hand-coded anything in HTML, but I seem to recall that you can have an alternate text/description inside the href or img tag that is distinct from any caption you might supply. That way, a sighted person would see the picture and caption, but in a speech-enabled setting, it would speak the alternate text along with the caption.
That said, I believe someone said that @danielpunkass’s MarsEdit can do this, and you can always go back and edit the post to add the alt attribute to the img after posting, which is what I do currently (although sometimes it takes me a while to get back to the laptop to do so; editing HTML in WordPress web admin on a phone is…not fun).
@smokey @cheri @liz @danielpunkass You’re right that MarsEdit can do this with external Wordpress blogs — but would that be true of hosted microblogs, too?
@cheri I’m not sure whether I’ve posted any photos yet, but I think this is a must-have sooner rather than later for such a inclusive community.
@rnv I think I can go back to the web editor later and add alt tags to the HTML. I tried once and it broke the HTML but I may have done it wrong.
@rnv @smokey @cheri @liz @danielpunkass As one of those blind users, I endorse this request. You can add the alt=“description here” to an <img> tag just before the closing > on the site or in an app like MarsEdit, but photo descriptions really should be baked in. I know @Manton has accessibility improvements in general on his todo list, and I'm really looking forward to them all. 😄
@cheri @rnv Maybe this is an instance when the lowly hosted website with the simple web interface has the fancy apps beat. On the web, click New Post, type a bunch of text, even put in a link. If you're still under 280, click on the icon of a camera to the left of the Post button and select an image you want to include in your posting. I usually wait a bit to give some time for it to load. Then I click the Post button and I get a nice posting that includes both the text and image. Easy.
@Ron But if a person is vision-impaired or blind, they will only hear that main text spoken, with no description of the image. What we’ve been discussing is how to add meta-data that would also include a short description of the image. So, in your your example, as well as the main text of your post about bison, there would also be alternate text that describes the image. Something like “a single bison standing in the afternoon light before a hillside on the great plains.” Sighted readers would see only the main text and the image, but blind readers would hear the main text dictated to them, and they'd also hear the alternate text that describes the photo.
@Ron (And as it turns out, MarsEdit makes it extremely easy to do exactly that, as long as you remember your vision-impaired readers.)
@cheri I usually add a task to my todo list in Things to add the alt=“” description if I post a picture from my phone.
@Ron Fair enough, but even if you did use the Micro.blog app on iOS or some third-party MacOS app like MarsEdit, the act of adding alternate text that describes an image attached to a post is potentially tricky, hidden, or even impossible. So, hopefully Manton and the small but mighty gang of developers working on third-party iOS and Android MB clients can figure out how to make it easier to do this, thereby allowing vision-impaired or blind Microbloggers to have as rich an experience as possible. I’m confident, especially considering how quickly features that were previously exclusively Apple/iOS-only have rolled out to non-Apple users, as you yourself have mentioned.
@rnv @Lioncourt Okay, then I bow out. You have gone beyond my level of skill. I am the Canary among the Apple nerds, talking (CAAN'T) about what an ordinary Joe can or cannot do with the tools I get for $5/mo. Josh, would you rather I didn't post messages that include text and an image, like my recent bison posting? I didn't realize I was making it hard for you, NOT my intention!!! Should I follow the lead of @Aleen and NOT post pictures here any longer?
@Ron @rnv @Aleen I would never advocate for anyone to stop posting whatever they like. Separate text in conjunction with the image itself works fine. The alt attribute is the nicest, cleanest way, but any sort of description you're comfortable with is helpful. No worries. 😀 I appreciate everyone willing to put in just a little effort to make photos more accessible to us all! 🙏
@Ron @Lioncourt I certainly don’t want to speak for Josh, but from my point of view, it’s better to understand that you’re excluding some people and to hope you can figure out how better to include them soon/eventually, than it is to not know you’re excluding people, or, worse, to know you’re excluding them and simply not care. For myself, going forward, I will continue to include images in my posts (something, frankly, I don’t do very often anyway), but I will try to at the very least add text to the post that evokes if not describes the image, and also perhaps explains why I’m posting the image in the first place.
@danielpunkass @rnv I can confirm this. I've posted several photos to M.B via MarsEdit and alt attributes are preserved. 👍🏼
@rnv As you say, fair enough. I should leave these technical discussions about the arcane nuances of posting behavior to the nerds. I just want to be able to easily do microblogging, which I had been thinking I could do here, even as a non-Apple blogger, not realizing the deleterious impact I was having on @Lioncourt and others.
@Ron One way you could provide a description of images is to put something like:
"Image description: blah blah blah"
If you put that separate from the main text of your post then at least something will be available, whilst we wait for Manton to provide a built-in option and you don't have to go tinkering with more complex solutions. This is certainly my approach moving forward and I am able to use the more complex option, since more than anything else said complex option is not always as reliable as plain text.
@Ron Hey, sorry: I didn’t mean for my “fair enough” to sound dismissive or aloof or snotty! This is a compelling conversation about accessibility, which hopefully will galvanize all the various Micro.blog developers to make it easier for all of us to be more inclusive.
@danielpunkass @rnv Yep, should work from MarsEdit. The issue here is just initially setting the alt text when uploading a photo from the Micro.blog app.
@rnv I used "fair enough" because I liked the phrase, not because of those feelings you described. I didn't even know it was a discussion about accessibility, that's how clueless I am! I should go back to tax accounting, which I know how to do. Micro.blog has become exceptionally complicated in recent days, with so many discussions of arcane changes that maybe (or maybe not) could/should be made or not made, when it all seemed very simple & straight forward to me before. Thanks for explaining the nuances of things. I'll let the dust settle for a while and concentrate on arguing for my feature request to Manton directly at help@micro.blog (already sent on 4 Aug 3:01 pm.)
@kulturnation I would be over the moon to have a MarsEdit for iOS—a sentiment that I fear @danielpunkass may be growing weary of hearing from MarsEdit users. 😂
@simonwoods Hi Simon, Having a rough day here today. The file name of my Buffalo image was "Buffalo-in-the-wild-in-the-park-1934-1937 . . . .jpg. When I wrote the posting about it, I clicked on the camera and that file name came up below the text window when I selected the image for posting. When I clicked to post the message and image, would @Lioncourt have been able to see that file name, which is a pretty good description?
@Ron The problem is people who post images without any description or context. For those who don't have vision limitations, it might be fine, but it's considered a good practice to add an invisible ALT description in the IMG tag, which doesn't display, but is available to the screen readers that help those whose sight is impaired. In your case, I would say this: if you post an image, include some description of the image in the text of your post and don't worry about the ALT property.
@manton So how should I go about posting an image that doesn't disadvantage @Lioncourt and others? Sorry, I don't know how to "set the alt text."
@Ron In the HTML of your post, which you can see when you look at the "Posts" page, look for the <IMG> tag. Then you can add a description with the ALT attribute. Example: <IMG SRC="guineapigs.jpg ALT="Yet another adorable photo of my guinea pigs Grace and Ada in their cage, enjoying a snack of parsley."> Admittedly, this is geekier than we would like the solution to be, but we are working on it. As I said in my previous post, if the text of your post says "Here's my adorable guinea pigs eating parsley." then the ALT tag is redundant.
Maybe you should get some guinea pigs to test with... 😂
@Lioncourt It's just a choice I made; nobody asked me to :) I use micro.blog almost exclusively on mobile; adding alt text is non-trivial and I hit against the character limit when I add a description. I mostly just post photos to Instagram where I have the characters to spare to add a description.
@Lioncourt @kulturnation It is reassuring to know that when I finally finish MarsEdit for iOS, it will be appreciated :)
@Ron Hey, Ron. This stuff gets convoluted quickly, mostly because it's built on code that has never really been updated to work more easily with anybody but those foolish enough to spend lots of time working with it (example: I know about it but have learned mostly through trying lots of things and generally coming to dislike it).
Unfortunately your filename is not automatically carried over into the post and even if it was I'm not sure the image filename is viewable. As Jean explained, the necessary code is essentially an invisible tag. This is why I suggest adding a plain text description in the post, however the trade-off is that you use characters to do that and you have to go back and edit your post to insert the tag.
The above list of comprimised actions are why people continue to ask for a built-in feature, perhaps a text field when you upload a picture which would then auto-add the tag to the picture... something along those lines. Either way the current solutions are all far too hostile to all but those of us who choose to get lost in the code.
(sorry for the length -- I'd usually make this a blog post but it doesn't seem appropriate to do that for this conversation)
@macgenie Hey, thanks for injecting some light hearted thoughts into this, much appreciated! Things turned a little ugly today, with the platform suddenly getting hard. But you, @rnv @Lioncourt @kulturnation @JohnPhilpin & @simonwoods have all come to my aid, which I very much appreciate.
@simonwoods Thanks Simon. When I have the time, I will probably experiment with editing some of the postings in my Archive and maybe insert some imvisible tags. I think I've nearly always put in some title or explanatory text with my images. just 'cause I wanted everyone to understand what the image had to do with anything. I was gonna do a whole series on bison, but maybe it's too complicated for it now.
@Ron Until we add a formal UI for this, the work-around is to post the photo normally, then click Edit on the post under the Posts page and add an alt="description here" into the img tag. (You should still have text above the photo as you've been doing, since people will see that in the timeline too.)
@Ron It is still too much work to label photos that way. I just give them a title and I’m done. Not so accessible I guess, but I have my own problems to deal with.
@manton Thanks for the specific instructions, Manton. I'll try it sometime soon. I'm really looking forward to starting my Micro.blog Academy course!
@Ron I just wanted to say that I appreciate how patient you’ve been with all of us flinging all of the technical details around today, Ron, and for being the canary who reminds us when we stop and take a step back and remember that not everyone knows these things like the back of their hands.
@Ron I don’t think anyone want the platform to feel harder to use. Sometimes the discussion just might have to turn more technical to surface a good solution.
In the end we will all benefit. 😃
