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Folks, I want to boost your lovely posts, I really do but I won’t if you don’t write image descriptions (alt text) so people who use screen readers can also experience them.
It doesn’t take long to write one.
And if you’re posting an image of text and you have an iPhone, you can select the text from the image with a long press and copy/paste it.
Even Linux has apps that do this (like Frog: https://tenderowl.com/work/frog/)
(And yes, sometimes I’ll extract the text and write the image description in the thread for you but that usually takes me longer to do after the fact than it would take you to do during – as I mostly end up have to split it into several posts whereas alt-text has a much higher character limit – and it’s still not the same thing as it requires someone to read the thread in hopes of perhaps discovering what the mystery image is about.)
@aral if posting from an Android with google lens installed it is almost as easy.
Open image (in photos). Click search, then text, then select all and copy. Sometimes you can go straight to text.
The only problematic case is when text is in columns.
The other problem is when the image contains mathematics, but that is more of a niche problem.
@DToher (Sadly, of course, it does mean that Google also knows exactly what you’re translating. But then again, they also know everything else their phone tells them, the lovely surveillance capitalists that they are.)
@aral The (excellent) Mastodon PWA has text extraction built in. So easy. No excuses.
@charlesroper @aral never worked for me, just froze the browser 
@aral Thankyou for the reminder. I keep forgetting to do this, and I aim to fix it.
@aral 
followed as of now.
@aral Yes it was. I got followed back, looks like the right account :)
@aral I will also beseech people: if it is a screenshot of a social media post, please find and link to the original instead. If you can't find the original, perhaps it's not real (and you shouldn't share it).
If it's of a heinous person you don't want getting clicks: reconsider sharing it. Perhaps link to a news article about whatever it is. If there's no news article, perhaps it's not important enough to be worth sharing. If you really must, use something like archive.today.
@aral I just discovered that Tusker (currently in test) on iOS has an option to require attachment descriptions, so maybe other apps can also do this. There is also https://mastodon.social/@alt_text, which will let you know if you post an image without a description.
@aral Great tip about copy pasting the message text into the Alt Text field!
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@aral only realized it when I read this.
What is obvious for some people, is not that obvious for others and vice versa.
Thanks for the tip.
@aral Well, why not both, boost posts you think will be of value to others while still reminding others to write alt text?
That strikes me as the path toward building up instead of tearing down, depriving your followers of content you think would uplift them for the sake of kind of punishing people who leave off the alt text.
@aral hope I’m doing it correctly. I write it on bottom of photo..
@kcsorenby Yep, you are; I can see them :)
