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1. Eystein (eys@front-end.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:36:48 JST Eystein

   • Velocipede Rider

   @ruari Alt texts should ideally be kept under 125 characters; because JAWS (don’t know about other screen readers) will cut it off at that point. The longdesc attribute is recommended for longer descriptions. Of course, that’s not available in the UI most (any?!) places, so I reckon pasting the whole text in a follow-up toot is sort of a solution.

   • Fedi.Tips 🎄 (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:39:48 JST Fedi.Tips 🎄

     in reply to

     • Velocipede Rider

     @eys @ruari

     Wow, this is first time I've heard anyone mention this.

     Is there some reason why JAWS does that? Seems a bit of a bad design for a screen reader, to leave out most of the text available?

   • Fedi.Tips 🎄 (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:44:21 JST Fedi.Tips 🎄

     in reply to

     • Velocipede Rider

     @eys @ruari

     Okay, just based on a nose around the internet, looks like JAWS does show more than 125 characters, but splits it up into 125 character chunks:

     https://terrillthompson.com/tests/altlength.html

   • Fedi.Tips 🎄 (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:49:18 JST Fedi.Tips 🎄

     in reply to

     • Velocipede Rider

     @ruari @eys

     Have consulted and followed a number of blind users on here about best practice for posting, and never heard this ever mentioned.

     I'm wondering if this is something that has entered web design circles a while ago and just stayed there as a rule?

     I just dropped a message to a blind user who has helped me out a lot, I'll see what they have to say.

   • Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:49:30 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • Fedi.Tips 🎄

     @feditips Yeah I need to think about this going forward. I often have long alt text and not just because I include a full copy of written words from a screenshot. Now I am thinking about how I should order things, so that the most relevant part is near the front, so when it is too long, they'll at least get something.

     @eys

   • Eystein (eys@front-end.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:08:06 JST Eystein

     in reply to

     • Fedi.Tips 🎄
     • Velocipede Rider

     @feditips @ruari Thank you for investigating and clearing it up for us!
     I've always worked with the assumption that alt texts should be short and precise - when it was first implemented in browsers it was to describe images rather than transcribe big blocks of screenshotted text 🤷🏻♂️
     There's also the chance that when the alt text replaces a non-loading image, the text might get cut off depending on the width & height of the image it's replacing.

   • Fedi.Tips 🎄 (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:08:32 JST Fedi.Tips 🎄

     in reply to

     • Velocipede Rider

     @eys @ruari

     Yeah, good point! Maybe the difference in the way different tags are treated is a holdover from the days when alt texts were also used as visual placeholders for sighted people? (In the days when images loaded slowly or not at all...)

   • Fedi.Tips 🎄 (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:10:47 JST Fedi.Tips 🎄

     in reply to

     • Velocipede Rider

     @eys @ruari

     Tried to have a look if this issue had been raised before, apparently longdesc is deprecated?

     https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5612

   • Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:44:19 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • Fedi.Tips 🎄

     @feditips I now eagerly await a future post on best tips when alt texting from you. 😆

     @eys