s17e10: Alt Text; Reply Management Stickers
0.0 Context Setting
It’s Tuesday, 13 February, 2024 in Portland Oregon and I’m going to have pancakes tonight.
I killed one of the goblin leaders by hilariously shoving them into a chasm but now am trying to figure out how to off the other two without bringing down the entire goblin camp on me.
1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention
1.1 Alt Text
Okay, usual disclaimer: this is me thinking out loud. Thinking out loud like this means “not really having done any research”.
In this particular case it also means “not having read up on the start of the art in accessibility and accessible design.”
In this very particular case, it also means “not even having spoken to people who need descriptive text”.
It’s great that alt text is now visibly asked for when posting an image to social software!
However, it gets super annoying having to describe images all the time!
Especially if you’re having to do it repeatedly for the same image!
What could you do?
Create alt text once and embed it in an image’s metadata. I’m sure there’s an EXIF field you could use.
For photographs, have the OS / “computational photography engine” create and embed alt text at the time the photograph was taken.
When adding an image via a client, have that client create alt text at the time the image is added (this seems inefficient, you’d be doing it multiple times)
You’d need to make sure that you’ve got a good flow for approving any automatically generated descriptive text. You’d also want to bake that text in so you don’t have to edit it in each posting app.
Someone is probably already on this.
1.2 Reply Management Stickers
Last Friday I made a sticker to use on Mastodon, which has... kinds of people. Today I made some more and posted them to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads.
Here’s the list:
This is an observation / do not attempt to help / no reply necessary
Do not reply with a software suggestion
Do not reply to tell me to use open source software
Do not reply to teach me about capitalism or enshittification. I know.
Do not reply to tell me you don’t have this problem.
Do not reply to deny my lived experience
Do not reply unless you have direct experience.
I am going to break my rule of not having images in my newsletter because, well, it doesn't make sense if you can't see these.
Oh, and the original one:
There’s an album of all of them.
Look. I made these because I think people need better ways of managing replies in social software. They are also kind of a joke? I mean, a joke and also serious? They’re a joke in the sense that “ha ha we all know someone who replies like that” and also maybe a joke because they’re a little bit socially transgressive?
I’ve been told people like the design, but honestly I think it’s a bit too simplistic. The first one I knocked up in Keynote in about five or so minutes, the bit that took the longest was picking what to use from SF Symbols.
Caught my attention because: no, seriously. The response to these has been... surprisingly unsurprising. People really like them.
Short one today.
How are you doing?
Best,
Dan
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