@Charlotte Joanne I'm among those who want to do what's right myself. But I go to greater lengths.

Describing my images at all doesn't cut it for me. I go into small details for those who would love to go exploring a whole new and unknown world just by looking at my images, but who can't see them. If something about my images isn't common knowledge, I explain it, I explain the explanation and so forth, just because I think having people look such things up is not accessible and not inclusive.

Whenever someone likes something about someone else's image descriptions, I try to implement it myself. That's why I go as far as describing the position, height and angle of the camera if it's out of the ordinary.

I also try hard to follow as many rules of good image descriptions as possible and follow them to a tee. I transcribe text that's impossible to read. There's a rule that all text within the borders of an image must be transcribed, but there's none about unreadable text. I always prefer to err on the side of too much.

The only rule I break is the rule that alt-text must be as short as possible, preferably no longer than 200 characters. But that rule conflicts with the other rules, with what seems to make an image description good and with what my images in particular need. And besides, there seem to be more people in the Fediverse who like detailed descriptions than people who insist in short alt-text.

And so I fill the alt-text up to the limit of 1,500 characters imposed by several Fediverse projects. And what goes into the alt-text is actually already greatly shortened from the sheer monstrosity of a detailed image description that I put into the post.

I can take several days to describe one image. The resulting full, long image description can be longer than a hundred standard Mastodon toots for one single image, just so that it can provide all information that I think must be provided.

Obviously, this fails to satisfy everyone, even nearly everyone. I guess that for many Fediverse users, even my short descriptions in the alt-text are too long because they keep exceeding 1,000 characters. Even then, they're lacking. In particular, they're almost always lacking text transcripts because they don't have enough room.

The text transcripts are in the full, long, detailed description in the post. But many people can't even be bothered to open the content warning behind which the post is hidden, much less read tens of thousands of characters of image description or have them read to them.

And then I come across things like this blog post by @Robert Kingett, blind that says that AI image descriptions are generally vastly superior to human-written ones.

Apparently, AI is fully capable of actually perfectly satisfying absolutely everyone with image descriptions, no matter what kind of image has to be described, and no matter who the audience may be.

Apparently, the minimum requirements for image descriptions in the Fediverse have shifted. Halfway accurate descriptions aren't that much better than nothing anymore. They aren't good enough anymore. No matter what humans produce, it isn't good enough anymore.

Even if I spend two full days, sunrise to sunset, describing one single image in over 60,000 characters which I've actually done, the description isn't good enough. And I don't mean good enough in size. I also mean good enough in accuracy, level of detail and informativity.

No matter how niche and how obscure the topic of my images is, any AI out there can describe the same image in fewer characters, but at the same time in more details, with more information and even factually more accurately. And this is apparently the minimum level that counts as good enough.

Basically, my image descriptions only serve to satisfy Mastodon's fully sighted alt-text police and for me to have an edge over their quality requirements. At least until they decide that my descriptions aren't useful enough. From that point on, I'll be the only one out there who finds AI descriptions sub-par in comparison with my own ones.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI #A11y #Accessibility