Posting photos on #Mastodon can be a bit daunting for me due to the expectation of including alt text. When I don't have the luxury of time to craft a suitable description or am struggling to come up with one on the spot, I usually end up skipping the photo altogether. It would be great if there was an AI-powered solution for #alttext that could consistently deliver reliable results.
@LouisIngenthron it's not intimidating. But imagine you are out and about, you think, oh! People might like to see this vista... But you are about and about, at the time you put it off to a time when you have more time and then you never get round to doing it.
@gpowerf Ahhh. I mostly use social media on desktop. I forget most people use it on mobile. I can see why there'd be some extra friction there.
@gpowerf After a few times of dealing with that myself, I came up with these sort-of rules: something is better than nothing, it's not necessary to go into every detail, don't repeat what it's already in the main text, don't spend time proof-reading it 😄
I don't usually spend more than a minute on each description, even on the go.
Another way could be saving posts with pictures into the Drafts and posting only when you're more comfortable with adding descriptions...?
@JJFlash my rule at times has been... well, this Toot can do without the image :)
@gpowerf That can also be a good exercise, like having only 140 chars to express yourself ;)
@JJFlash LOL! I'm not a huge proponent of limiting the number of characters to something very low. Turns us all into grunting cavepeople.
@gpowerf Heh 😁
It depends on the subject, I guess.
In the early times of Twitter, it often helped me to go effectively straight to the point, since I tend to beat about the bush many times...
@gpowerf I don't understand this (and you're not the first person I've heard say this). What's so intimidating about writing a brief description of an image?