Mark @mark@a11y.social

Anyway, taking inspiration from those discussions I've injected some CSS (https://gist.github.com/FiXato/3de505b04efefd49a1e3568b70545234) to a11y.social that surrounds images with a dotted red border if they DO NOT have alt text.

As a sighted user, I found Twitter's ALT button useful for deciding whether or not to offer up a description in a reply.

More recently...there is an on going discussion over whether or not to introduce Twitter's ALT button overlay to Mastodon.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18394

One of the commenters linked to their own evaluation of the ALT feature on Twitter:

https://adrianroselli.com/2022/04/keyboard-challenges-for-twitters-new-alt-badge.html

A good read.

Adding alt text on Mastodon has been around roughly as long as Twitter. It took about 10 months to roll out between 2016 and 2017. What I love about the issue discussion is that once the matter was raised, nobody argued against it.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/117

One of the joys of open source software is that the user gets to participate in and have a window into the development process.

Also worth mentioning. I run this instance mostly to evaluate accessibility of the various federated social platforms. Happy to have newcomers signing up though! I don't intend on shutting down, but if I ever do, I will notify and create a migration path for everyone on this instance.

If you're new to the a11y.social instance don't forget to check "List this account on the directory" in your profile! This helps people find you when they join or explore the instance (e.g., https://a11y.social/explore)

First Toot! Just completed a successful trip to Hawaii with the blind outrigger paddling team from The Makapo Aquatics Project. Congrats to tall the paddlers! More here: https://www.makapo.org/coopinhawaii2022