Ask Lemmy

Mostly cultural. There’s a fair number of masto users who will not boost posts without alt text, and will say so in your mentions. Also the admin from the New Jersey instance runs a scoreboard for the instance that uses alt text most consistently that a fair number of people take seriously.

edit: I think the cultural difference arose out of who the early adopters were -- a lot of early mastodon users were indie web folks who were interested in the w3c, and think a lot about accessibility on the web, whereas a lot of early threadiverse adopters were reddit refugees where it wasn't something people thought about as much.

If you don't use alt text on mastodon the image is flagged with a large alert symbol in the corner. Here, nothing happens. That's a huge part of the difference in culture. There's a similar divide between mastodon and Bluesky.

Mastodon also inherently stops to ask if you want to post an image without alt text.

There's immediate visual feedback telling you, "you've missed something."

I think it's a design issue.

When you add an image, the alt-text box pops up near the bottom of the page (it is not visible before you add an image). If you're not looking for it/aware of it, it's easy to miss. I don't post a ton of image posts for example, so if I did one it stands to reason I might forget if I was too quick to post.

The alt-text box should really pop up right below the image, above where you input the body of the post, not farther down the page. In fact it could always be there but just be greyed out until an image is added.

useless red circle:

I try really hard to always add alt text! Maybe this is something the Lemmy software/apps need to support more, e.g. prompt the user if no alt text is provided.

Just checked, and Mastodon provides a little warning to tell you to add alt text:

It's probably not even clear to most Lemmy users that the [] for images in markdown are where you put the alt text.

Mastodon is ostensibly a broadcast communication method between users. Lemmy/Piefed is a link aggregator.

There's a different emphasis on responsibilities here. If I'm broadcasting something for people's benefit, I want to extend that to everyone as best as I can, and it's my content, so I'm responsible for doing so.

If it's just "here's a website or image I found", do I care more than the original creators did?

My version of the Jerboa app doesn't explicitly say how to add alt text, so I think it's partially an app support issue. I only know how to do it for inline comment images.

Boosting itself is closer to Mastodon terminology to begin with. The idea of reblogging a single comment or reply isn't as prevalent, as much as crossposting a thread.

I've added alt text as part of links in most of my comments with images or videos, I just don't know if anyone has seen them? Can you view this one?

Next time you think of skipping alt text, think of the poor AI crawlers and all the unlabeled images they have to save.