Alls, with trying to use micro.blog as Fediverse “client” too, I then and now stumble across certain smaller glitches. This one, in example:
I’m increasingly seeing people handling things like this and moving information to the image description in order to not duplicate those in the post itself. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to work with micro.blog as I don’t have a way to view ALT texts in here? or do I miss something here…?
If you’re using a Mac try holding down both Command and Shift then hover the cursor over the image. On my machine the alt text is displayed.
Hmmm, thanks, but unfortunately, didn’t work. I’m on either Linux (desktop) or Android (mobile). So far, my workaround is the web developer console and “inspect object” but this feels a tad clumsy…
This is entirely up to your browser. There are probably extensions to make it easier. Also, this is considered pretty bad form to hide new content there versus using it for accessibility description. Generally folks who rely on alt text are pretty ticked by this kind of stuff that I’ve seen.
Not really sure about both to be honest. At the very least for desktop, my browser displays ALT text in a message while hovering an image for a reasonably large amount of sites so I somehow considered this to be the default behaviour which doesn’t however seem to happen on micro.blog. Will have to dig deeper into that, then.
Notes for future visitors: I noticed my mobile browser does that sufficiently by long-tapping any image and opening its context menu. For the desktop, I use developer tools if needed. Not perfect, but at least I get the information that are missing elsewhere.
To add a little more context here, alt text was never intended to be shown like a caption. There’s a separate HTML attribute title that does that. However, increasingly more platforms are using alt text for more than just accessibility. I’m a little conflicted about how we should handle this in Micro.blog. We could certainly copy the alt text to title… That’s what Mastodon does.
Oh, ok, thanks for outlining. Wasn’t aware of this distinction. So … seems it’s again some unique way introduced by Mastodon here? Looking at different streams, I’m unsure too what’s a good solution about that, as the way how people use alt texts seems pretty different and ranging from posting page-long essays to short snippets. So at least from that angle, copying alt to title seems a disputable approach. 
What about making that a configuration option for the timeline view, like “display alt text” (in smaller font, next to the image)?
We can consider that. Ultimately, this might be a losing battle and we should just show alt text like Mastodon does. People are sort of using alt text “wrong” but it is what it is. 
My favorite implementations are a small button to click and show alt text. I deeply dislike actually impacting semantic HTML and hijacking how the browser works to support bad practices, especially since I should be able to use a title attribute myself, safely.
Would like to agree here.
So instead of asking people to not abuse the alt text, we’re just going to enable them? Awesome.
Making it easier to see alt text content doesn’t necessary enable them. I think the abuse is hijacking alt text into other elements which explicitly condones that alt text should be treated as equivalent to that element (like titles or captions).
An affordance for alt text to be more easily toggled for visibility is not much difference than letting a closed captioning button be more accessible. What I wouldn’t want is for closed captions to be automatically thrown into a description field.
Okay let me clarify: using alt text as a way to hide your words, rather than its intended and well-documented use, is abuse.
I agree that twisting around semantic HTML is the wrong approach. At least, I think that’s what you mean but I get a bit confused with the swappable jargon (“description” vs “caption” vs the attribute names).
@manton I’m curious as to why the title attribute is any better, since I thought that was for tooltips? I know the figcaption tag exists for actual captioning but I assume this is then complicated since it isn’t an attribute.
What we’re saying would be a nice feature is exposure on Micro.blog to see the contents of an alt tag.
What many other services do, including Mastodon, as I learned here, is take the content of an alt attribute and populate the title attribute with that content so that tooltips show alt content.
I think that is a bad idea, but not making it easier to see alt content.
Title. caption, and description are all possible non-alt tag attributes that are more appropriate places for the type of content that people are abusing with alt tags with their own display mechanisms. Rather than hijack those with alt content, it would be nice for MB to do special treatment to expose alt content.
FWIW, on mobile devices I sometimes need alt text to decipher poorly thought-out screenshots of text. Or because the subject of an image is not self-evident to me. The alt text though, has a longer history than just accessibility. Doesn’t XKCD still use it for a sort of extra inside joke? Or are they using “title” instead?
@jsonbecker Yep, that’s what I thought you meant, and I agree entirely.
@mrstoneman Since it appears as a tool-tip I believe they are using “title”, yes.
