Elena Rossini ⁂
@_elena@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@rbreich another screenshot with no #AltText? Please it would take seconds to copy and paste the text here, thus making it accessible for everyone.

This space is text-based. And we care about #AltText, inclusivity and accessibility here.

It’s exhausting to keep commenting with #AltTextForYou when you could have as easily copied & pasted the text.

And Fedi people please stop boosting posts that don’t have Alt Text, I beg you
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@_elena @rbreich

Why include the image at all? The image isn’t even a quote of someone else. The flow seems to be:

  1. Write some text.
  2. Post some text.
  3. Screenshot the text (why not just copy it like a human would?)
  4. Attach the screenshot to a toot.

I can only assume that the main purpose of the toot is to advertise BlueSky, rather than anything related to the content of the BlueSky post.

I wouldn’t complain if this were the first time, but it’s most of what @rbreich posts.

My rule of thumb for basic politeness is: If doing something benefits others and costs you nothing, would you do it? It’s a very low bar.

Copying the text instead of making a screenshot adds zero effort, but both reduces the bandwidth everyone seeing this needs to use and makes life easier for visually impaired people and people for whom English is not their first language (translation tools work automatically on a lot of Mastodon instances for text, including alt text, but not for images).

The core of rudeness is deciding that your time is worth more than other people’s. When you won’t do something that takes approximately none of your time to save a larger amount of effort for a large number of people who read your posts, that’s very rude.

Unfollowed @rbreich. I am not going to waste time reading posts by people that rude.
Timo
@timo21@mastodon.sdf.org replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@rachel Reich is a prominent liberal economist who was in the government when liberals ran it, but now is out of government and is teaching and writing. He does video segments for Free Speech TV. He's an important person in the world of economics. But whoever is posting his material on Mastodon needs to do alt text, and also list this account as a bot.

@shollyethan @_elena
Elena Rossini ⁂
@_elena@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@david_chisnall thank you for sharing this important perspective David.

I speak English & I had completely missed the angle that sharing this as a text post allows people (who don’t understand English) to translate the message. Something that can’t be done with a photo.

Why share a photo at all? Maybe hoping people copy it & re-use it on other Big Tech platforms like Instagram? I see no other logical reason.

I just think it’s terrible etiquette that doesn’t consider accessibility

@rbreich