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@Elena Brescacin @Charlotte Joanne @Andre Louis @Pratik Patel @Devin Prater :blind: @Robert Kingett, blind

I'm terribly sorry for writing to you out of the blue, but absolutely all more acceptable ways of trying to get some feedback or advice from Mastodon users have failed me this week. And I take it that you are in the right position to give me competent feedback or advice in accessibility.

So here's my question right away: What do blind users prefer when it comes to explaining images? Externally linked explanations? Or everything explained in the post, even if this amounts to tens of thousands of characters of only explanation?

Now allow me to elaborate. This is going to be long.

I am someone who always tries to get image descriptions and explanations as right as possible. You may or may know that already.

So here's the thing: I've started posting memes again just recently. And I'm trying hard to max out the accessibility of my meme posts. Since I'm not on Mastodon, I don't have Mastodon's limitations in my way. In particular, I don't have character limits to worry about. This means that I can describe and especially explain a whole lot of things in the post itself rather than having to squeeze it into the alt-text.

Until now, it has always looked to me like it's better to give all necessary explanations in the post than to link to external explanations. One or a few people have told me so. And I've run a poll a while ago, and eight out of the nine sighted voters as well as the one sole non-sighted voter preferred explanations in the post over externally-linked explanations.

Now, if I want to explain a meme post in a way that everyone understands it, I have to explain a lot. I've written a half-experimental meme post based on the "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" meme. Here is a link to that post.

So I had to explain the post itself. But I also had to explain the "One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor" meme. In order for people to understand that explanation, I had to explain snowclones, image macros and advice animals. In order for people to understand these three extra explanations, I also had to explain Something Awful and 4chan including a general explanation of imageboards. Also, in order for people to understand my post, I had to explain FEP-ef61, nomadic identity, Hubzilla, the streams repository and the whole 14-year history of the latter two from Mistpark from 2010 to this year's Forte and their various underlying protocols.

That one meme post required nine explanations with some 25,000 characters. And in fact, I could have explained The Lord of the Rings and the ActivityPub protocol on top of that, but I took both for common enough knowledge that my post is understandable enough without explaining them.

Again, 25,000 characters of explanations for one image, just so the image can be understood without any external information. Apparently, it's exactly this which the Fediverse prefers.

But I can't believe that this is actually what the Fediverse prefers. First of all, I've been told again and again that tens of thousands of characters are not accessible because they're much too long, regardless of where I put them. It's hard to believe that they're supposed to still be more accessible than external links. Besides, my information almost entirely comes from sighted people.

So here's my question again: Do blind people really prefer 25,000 characters of explanation for one meme post over externally-linked explanations?

(Deliberately without a content warning this time to make this post more easily accessible.)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #Memes #Inclusion #A11y #Accessibility