Folks, it’s encouraging to see more of you writing alternative text on images here so people who use screen readers can also take part but please make sure the text really is the equivalent of the image.
So, for example, if you’re posting a screenshot of some text, don’t just say “Excerpt of article” or “A tweet by so-and-so” but actually copy/paste the text from it (many platforms let you do this with images these days).
Folks who use screen readers have the right to hear what we see.
If I upload a picture that has text, there is a facility to scan the image for text, it didn't work last time I tried it. So in most cases can type small amounts of text manually.
Perhaps there could be a way to embed or append image metadata with the actual text of the image, then mastodon could be able to pick that up.
There are tools for stenography so it is possible to do that.
@zleap Which platform(s) are you using? On iOS (and I believe macOS) you can do that natively by clicking and dragging on text in an image.
For Linux, I use Frog (https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.tenderowl.frog).
#a11y #accessibility #altText #opticalCharacterRecognition #ocr #linux
@zleap @aral
I tried OCR this weekend on my IPhone:
https://earthstream.social/@LittleSteps2B/109845345500752078