@Karen E. Lund Would you lose points for very long alt-texts/image descriptions?

I tend to describe my original images in extremely high details. Recently (for any definition of "recently" because I haven't posted a single image in over a year due to the huge effort of describing them), my alt-texts tend to reach 1,500 characters or one or a few below that. At least ca. 900 characters are actual image descriptions, sometimes up to ca. 1,400.

And that's what I consider a "short" description. Because the rest of the alt-text explains where to find the "long" description. It's in the post itself. It includes verbatim transcripts of every last bit of text anywhere within the borders of the image, readable or not. And it includes all explanations which I deem necessary for everyone to understand my images.

This long description exceeds any known arbitrarily defined character limit anywhere in the Fediverse by magnitudes. I can post such long image descriptions because the only character limit I have here on Hubzilla is the maximum size of the database field for the post text.

Yes, you've read that right. I describe each one of my original images twice.

And I must write my image descriptions that long. I don't post real-life photos, nor do I post social media screen shots. I post renderings from extremely obscure 3-D virtual worlds. Maybe one in 200,000 Fediverse users has even only heard of the technology that drives them.

Thus, I cannot assume anything in my images to be familiar to anyone out there. I can't assume that anyone out there knows what anything in my images looks like, also because my images tend to contain things which simply do not exist in real life in any shape or form.

At the same time, my impression is that especially Mastodon users expect all information which they don't have to be served on a silver platter immediately with the image description. If you mention something in your image, and somebody doesn't know what it looks like, you're obliged to describe it right away. Expecting anyone to ask you anything about your image after the fact feels like being considered ableist. I mean, you could just as well expect people to ask you to describe the whole image in the first place, right?

Same goes for explanations. Given the choice between looking stuff up themselves, being given links where they can look stuff up and being explained everything right there, right then, Mastodon users appear to greatly prefer the latter and only consider the latter really accessible.

And I have to explain a lot. When I tell you where I've taken an image, this alone takes me more characters than some of you use for a whole day's worth of alt-texts. The whole topic is so obscure that I have to explain explanations of explanations.

My personal record (warning: technically outdated image descriptions): 1,500 characters of alt-text, 1,400+ of which are image description; 60,000+ characters of long description for one image. That's about 10,000 words. It took me two full days, morning to evening, to research for and write the image descriptions. It takes a screen reader about three hours to read the long description out loud. But someone somewhere out there might be interested in all this information and displeased if they had to ask me about it to get it.

As for bilinguality, I should add to my WIP wiki on image descriptions and alt-texts that an alt-text must never include more than one image because screen readers cannot switch between languages mid-alt-text.

What I do, and I'm not even sure if that's such a good idea, is transcribe text in images that is not in English verbatim, literally letter by letter, and then translate it into English as closely as possible. I'm torn between a verbatim transcript which a screen reader cannot read out correctly and only giving a translation which would not be a verbatim transcript.

In fact, I've once had a situation in which I had to transcribe a sign in English, (broken) German and French. So I gave

• a 100% verbatim transcript of the English text
• a 100% verbatim transcript of the German text, all mistakes included
• an English translation of the German text that's as close to the original as possible
• a 100% verbatim transcript of the French text
• an English translation of the German text that's as close to the original as possible

Nowadays, I'd simply avoid posting images with non-English text anywhere in it like the plague.

CC: @Kim Possible :kimoji_fire: @Jayne

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@Baranduin

Oh does this feel like my inner monologue when I post a photo. It is a bummer that it, at times, prevents me from posting more photos, but I hope this make me a little more quality over quantity.

I actually keep entire categories of things out of my images because I can't describe them up to my own standards. This includes realistic buildings. I would first have to look up loads of architectural terms to describe all details of a building, and then I would have to explain each and every one of these architectural buildings in a way that absolute laypeople understand my image description without ever having to ask me anything or look anything up themselves.

The last time I posted an image with a building was this post. I actually went around and looked for a nice motive for a new image post for quite a while. There was one harbour scene which I thought looked spectacular enough to show, but which was impossible to describe. So I fell back to this motive. I thought it's not too bland, not too simple and at the same time not too complex. Besides, the one building in the image is totally unrealistic and without all the tiny details that would make up a realistic building.

And then I ended up taking some 30 hours over two days to describe the image in over 60,000 characters. The building alone took up some 40,000 or so. This is still the longest image description in the whole Fediverse, I think. Here is the image describing log thread.

My last image post before that was this one with still over 25,000 characters of description for one image, and I consider it outdated slop.

It was the last time that I described an image in my image with more details than visible in the original of that image itself. And that's where I got sloppy. I completely forgot to transcribe what's written on the license plate above the office door of the motel in that image in my image. And I couldn't be bothered to give detailed descriptions of the two 1957 Chevy Bel Airs parked in front of the motel because I really wanted to get that description done. In the actual image, all of this is sub-pixel-sized. You wouldn't know it's even there if I didn't mention it. I did describe the motel, but it's a fairly simple building, and I decided against describing what's visible through the windows with open blinds from the camera angle in the image in my image.

In the next image, the one with 60,000+ characters of description, I stopped describing images in the image beyond what I can see in the place where the image itself was taken. That was because one image is a destination preview image on a teleporter. The destination is a kind of teleport hub. The preview actually (if only barely so) shows over 300 single-destination teleporters, a few dozen of them with their own preview images.

So I teleported to that hub to describe it in detail. And I looked at the teleporters and their preview images. Turned out, not only do these preview images pretty much all have text in them and not necessarily few bits of text, but some of them actually have images within themselves again.

I would have had to describe that image in my image, dozens of images in that image in my image and a number of images in these images in that image in my image. For each of the latter, I would have had to teleport three times from the place that I originally wanted to describe. I would also have had a whole lot more text to transcribe. All on a sub-pixel scale several times over.

Not only would that have been a humongous task, but more importantly, it would have inflated my image description and my whole post to more than 100,000 characters. Mastodon would probably have rejected my post for being too long. And this would have rendered the whole effort futile. In the few places in the Fediverse that would still have accepted my post, nobody cares for image descriptions.

AI certainly can't get inside my brain well enough to write accurate descriptions. Even if it could would I? hmmm.

I've only used AI to describe images twice. And in both cases, that was to show just how bad AI is at describing images about an extremely obscure and quickly changing niche topic at the level of accuracy and detail which I deem necessary for that topic.

I guess one problem that you're facing is that next to nobody in the Fediverse can even grasp what you're thinking about, what you're taking into consideration for your image descriptions. That's why you got next to no feedback upon your first comment in this thread.

I have one advantage here: What you're pondering, I have actually done. If I feel like people won't understand what I'm thinking about, I point them at one or several of my actual image posts, and/or I post a quote from one of my actual image descriptions. Still, almost nobody actually goes and reads through any of my image descriptions, but I guess they get the gist, especially when I post snippets from my actual descriptions.

CC: @Icarosity

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@Lucy idk Das Posten von Bildern geht auf Hubzilla völlig anders als auf Mastodon.

Auf Mastodon hängst du Bilder einfach als Dateien an deinen Tröt dran. Ist so. Geht nicht anders. Wo sie dann auf dem Server landen, weißt du nicht, da hast du auch keine Kontrolle drüber, ist aber auch nicht dein Bier.

Auf Hubzilla sind da zwei Dinge anders. Zum einen kümmerst du dich selbst darum, wo die Bilder landen. Jeder Hubzilla-Kanal hat nämlich einen eingebauten Cloudspeicher mit eigenem Dateimanager und Unterordnern und Rechteverwaltung und WebDAV-Anbindung und allem Pipapo. In dem landen auch die Bilder, die du posten willst.

Zum anderen funktioniert Bilderposten auf Hubzilla nicht wie auf Twitter oder Mastodon, sondern wie auf einer Website oder in einem Blogpost. Die Bilder werden einzeln in den Post eingebettet, oben oder unten oder mittendrin, beliebig viele davon in einem Post und nicht nur maximal vier. Das heißt aber auch, daß sie aus dem Cloudspeicher in den Post verlinkt werden.

Noch dazu kriegst du keinen WYSIWYG-Klickibunti-Editor à la Word vorgesetzt, sondern du arbeitest mit blankem BBcode. Der kann zwar mit ein paar Buttons generiert werden, du siehst aber nicht den endgültigen Post in Echtzeit entstehen, während du ihn baust. Es gibt einen WYSIWYG-Editor, aber der ist optional und standardmäßig abgeschaltet. Wie gut der ist, weiß ich nicht, den habe ich nie benutzt.

Alt-Text ist im Gegensatz zu Mastodon auch kein separates Textfeld. Statt dessen muß er in den Einbettungscode für das jeweilige Bild per Hand mit reingebastelt werden. In Hubzillas eingebauter Dokumentation ist auch noch nicht erklärt, wie man das macht.

In Kommentaren ist es aktuell noch holpriger. Da mußt du erst im Browser in einem neuen Tab deine Kanalseite öffnen, da im Post-Editor das Bild einfügen, das du in einem Kommentar haben willst, den Alt-Text mit reinbauen, den Einbettungscode aus dem Post-Editor rausschneiden, zu dem Tab zurück, wo du kommentieren willst, und den Einbettungscode dann in den Kommentar-Editor unter dem jeweiligen Thread einfügen.

Neben Hubzilla nutze ich ja auch (streams), und genau wie Forte hat es aktuell gegenüber Hubzilla beim Posten von Bildern nur vier Vorteile:

• Man kann jetzt schon Bilder direkt in Kommentare einbauen.
• Man kann beim Hochladen eines Bildes in den Cloudspeicher oder auch hinterher durch Bearbeiten einen Alt-Text eintragen. Wenn man das Bild dann in eine Post oder Kommentar einfügt, ist der Alt-Text gleich dabei.
• Man kann Bilder in Posts und Kommentare direkt als Dateien vom eigenen Rechner einbauen. Dann kann man sich zwar nicht vorher schon aussuchen, wo im Cloudspeicher sie landen (man kann sie hinterher verschieben, ohne die Posts kaputtzumachen, wo sie eingebettet sind), und man kann dabei auch keinen Alt-Text eintragen und muß den wieder händisch in den Einbettungscode reinbauen. Aber man spart sich den Umweg über den Bilderupload in den Cloudspeicher.
• Wenn man dem Post den Hashtag #sensitive und/oder #nsfw verpaßt, werden alle im Post eingebetteten Bilder auf Mastodon ausgeblendet. Auf Hubzilla geht das gar nicht, weshalb ich Hubzilla kaum mehr zum Posten von Bildern nutze.

Was da aber auch nicht geht, ist, was @Ulrich (Hubzilla) will: ein Bild kopieren oder als Screenshot in die Zwischenablage holen und direkt in einen Post oder Kommentar reinpflanzen. Also, nicht eine Bilddatei, sondern das Bild, die Grafik an sich. Quasi, wie man auch Bilder in Word reincopypasten kann, wahrscheinlich auch in einen Mastodon-Tröt.

Das geht deswegen nicht, weil Hubzilla nur Bilder posten kann, die schon als Datei existieren, entweder auf deinem Rechner (dann werden sie beim Posten in den Cloudspeicher hochgeladen und dann von dem in den Post/Kommentar gelinkt) oder schon im Cloudspeicher auf deinem Hubzilla-Kanal oder (ganz schlechter Stil) von ganz woanders her gehotlinkt.

Damit das geht, was Ulrich will, müßte Hubzilla, wenn man ein Bild einfügt, blitzschnell aus dem Bild eine Datei (mit nichtssagendem Namen) generieren, in den Cloudspeicher packen, die Datei genau da, wo man das Bild im Post/Kommentar eingefügt hat, reinbauen und sofort das Bild in der WYSIWYG-Ansicht anzeigen, wenn man die nutzt. Im Gegensatz zu einer Word-Datei kann ein Fediverse-Post ja keine eigentlichen Bildinformationen enthalten.

CC: @Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝

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