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Meta-phobic Megan Moved

Abled people: the primary function of the alt text field is not to act as a little joke for other sighted people. It's not a fucking easter egg despite that having been normalized by XKCD.

You can certainly have a sense of humor in the alt text field just as you do the text text field, BUT after you've actually provided equitable alt text & img description. Transcribe the fucking text that sighted people are given in the image and describe any other relevant non-text parts of the img.

@glightly I know it isn't the point of the article but I am very upset that it is stated the diagram of a t-rex is inaccurate without saying what exactly is inaccurate, because it isn't obvious to me nor explained in the description, caption or anywhere else.

@glightly Discouraging this use is exactly why browsers stopped displaying alt text as a tooltip decades ago!

Here's a 24-year-old conversation about the issue: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug. Mastodon shouldn't have brought back this behavior.

bugzilla.mozilla.org1995 - (metadata) [RFE] metadata attributes not accessible to useVERIFIED (jonas) in SeaMonkey - UI Design. Last updated 2010-12-05.

@scott Although the OP discusses the use of alt text for something other than accessibility to screenreader users... That was how I was introduced to alt text - that it was really more like a caption that ID'd what the image that wasn't loading was an image of. So that use is still more for sighted folk.

But it's a good point that displaying it as a tooltip encourages its misuse.

@glightly Same result, though, right? It's alternative text if you can't see the image... regardless of the reason you can't see the image, be it limitations of your web browser, your connection, or your eyes.

@scott It doesn't give the same result, though. People write very differently when they think it's about images not loading for sighted people as opposed to when they realize it's for screenreader users who are mostly blind/low vision.

The way I wrote alt text changed quite a bit once I became aware that it was for screenreader users primarily. (Not sure if it was when first invented, but it has been for a while.)