For all the effort being made for alt text, how do I even read it in other people’s posts on Micro.blog?
@jean @bryan Call me sceptical 🧐 The way Mastodon is doing it takes away some of the freedom of web authoring to HTML standard. The alt attribute is a fail-safe, not something to be dispayed if the image properly loads and displays. If all goes well, it should be impossible to display its text. The title attribute or the figcaption element are the proper tools to add an intended description to an image.
@jean Thank you for that, and welcome back! Hope you have had a refreshing break from Micro.Blog! Vincent has had to put up with us in the meantime, and now he might need a break! We’re quite a demanding crowd. He’s done a great job while you have been away, but I am also glad to have you back.
We’ve had the “alt” tag in HTML for as long as I can remember, and if I had to rely on screen readers, I’d be sad. I’m not talking about Micro.Blog now, but the net in general. But I’m very excited about the momentum behind it now, hopefully it won’t fade. I recognise that I don’t always enter a description, or at least not a very good description myself, but that has often to do with not being able to copy text from certain apps, or that the alt-text entering screen doesn’t show the complete picture, (and I have a terrible short term memory. This is a concern with the way things currently work in the iOS app, and I hope this will be addressed at a later time. Hope you’ll have a smooth transition back to Micro.Blog, despite me throwing feature requests at you the first day back.
@jean I agree with @renevanbelzen here and would like to add a post as a deeper dive into this topic: thoughtbot.com/blog/alt-...