Passing on opportunities to take pictures because I couldn't sufficiently describe them; CW: long (almost 600 characters), image description meta
But even when I find something that seems halfway simple enough to not take several days to describe, I hit an obstacle while going through the image description in my mind. And I end up not even taking any pictures.
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@jupiter_rowland this is a fine example of how folks pushing too hard for image descriptions end up leaving us worse off in the end.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, right? It’s far better to have pictures without descriptions than to have no pictures at all.
@jupiter_rowland well, what I’m saying is it’s one of those cases of a false choice.
The choice is NOT a binary of descriptions vs no descriptions. The no images at all choice looms really large.
Nobody profits if there are no pictures.
So the good intention to help some ends up with the outcome of helping nobody.
It’s an unintended consequence.
he no images at all choice looms really large.
People can do without my images.
Nobody profits if there are no pictures.
But nobody is discriminated against either.
And I'm neither lectured for not doing something that I've previously taken to greater extremes than anyone else in the Fediverse, nor am I attacked for being ableist, nor am I being muted or blocked for not providing accessibility.
Spending two days on a 60,000-character image description neatly hidden behind a Mastodon-style content warning is less likely to get me lectured, attacked, muted or blocked than not providing any image description.
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@jupiter_rowland I get it.
One reason I wanted to speak out here is specifically to counter those people lecturing.
I know they have good intentions, but they might be doing more harm than good because they don’t see the bigger picture.
I guess the actual issue is image description/alt-text standards that assume that all pictures fall into maybe half a dozen categories, and my images being edge-cases that lead to absolutely enormous descriptions if the standards are applied too them.
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