ALT Text

One of the things I love about Mastodon^* (I mean, besides the wonderful people and interactions, and the ability to edit a post) is that you have the option of providing descriptive text to any image that you include with a post.

This is known as alternative text, or alt text. Alt text is used by search engines and by users to understand images they cannot see.

Ever since I learned about alt text, I've strived to include it any time that I post an image on Mastodon. And, being a writer, I try to be as descriptive as I can be to help anyone who might be curious to what I've posted.

For example, take the following photo:

Adding alt text, I would write: A closeup of an orange tabby cat who is asleep on a footrest (not shown). Only his head and part of his upper body are framed in the photo. An off-white fleece blanket is folded under him and his chin hangs off the edge of the blanket. His head is on the left half of the photo and his body stretches to the right.

What do you think?

You can also add alt text to videos and GIFs.

There are lots of people on Mastodon who use alt text to describe beautiful photographs or comic strips, memes, and screenshots. If I like their post, I'll repost (boost) it.

However, I still see lots of images in my feed where alt text isn't used at all. Of course, it's not wrong to omit descriptive text with an image but I feel that as a federated community, we're cutting some people out of some worthy content. If I see a post that I like, I'll tap the star to show that I like it but I won't repost it.

The original poster might exclude visually impaired members but I won't.

There are those who do add text to the alt-text area but they provide almost no meaningful information. In the photo of my cat, they might just type cat and leave it at that. I've also seen posts where the alt text is merely a copy-and-paste of the message in the body of the post, but it does not describe the image in any way at all, which I feel isn't helpful. Visually impaired people will use whatever means they have to read the post: they don't need that text repeated with the image.

If I read a post that I like and see that the alt text is scant or provides no indication of what the image is, not only will I not boost it, I won't hit the Like star.

Am I too extreme or picky?

I wanted to learn more about alt text and how I can make my descriptions as meaningful as possible, so I did some Googling. And I found lots of information but landed on a site that I think is succinct in explaining what alt text is and how you can be most effective when providing it.

Here's the link to it.

Essentially, you should be brief and succinct, and not add words that are redundant or don't add to what the image is. Sometimes, I can be too descriptive: for example, saying that Finn's head is on the left half of the photo. I don't know if it's unnecessary but I always think I should give more than less, as long as I'm not repeating myself.

I try.

How about you? Do you use alt text when it's an available option? If you don't use it, why not? Leave your comments below.

^* I know that Twitter/X also has this feature but I'm not going to talk about that platform anymore.