Hi, I’m new here and I’m thinking of using Micro Blog as the central place where my posts start. I’ve set up a simple account and enabled cross posting for Twitter and Mastodon. When I published an image on MB and cross posted it, the image description that I entered did not appear on Twitter or Mastodon.
I guess Micro.blog’s cross-posting feature simply lacks support for alt texts. So @manton would have to implement that.
You could use a third-party solution, like Bridgy, or roll your own.
If you’re posting to Mastodon or Twitter, and your <img> tag includes alt="..." , Bridgy will pass on that alt text and it will be included with the picture in your tweet or toot.
Yep, Micro.blog needs to be updated to pass alt text to Twitter. I believe this uses a different API, which is why it wasn’t a simple change for us to make. Definitely want to do this.
Cross-posting alt text works on Twitter for me, as the person mainly in charge of an account for an R&D non-profit, but is not reliably working on Mastodon.
I’m getting harsh DMs from people on Mastodon that assume we don’t care about accessibility. We have to be able to post images, and alt text is a big deal on Mastodon. Accessibility is a requirement in our non-profit work, so it’s painful to sometimes have alt text show up and sometimes it doesn’t. Twitter cross-posting seems very reliable, so we know it’s working.
I’d love to get some advice here on what to do. We really like Micro Blog and want to keep it. Micro Blog is its own very nice thing, we really like it, and it also allows cross-posting. It’s clearly the best solution.
Is there some other way other than the GUI box to put in alt text that will guarantee it gets included with the image on Mastodon? Maybe using the inline commands is better? Any advice here deeply appreciated.
Cross-posting to Twitter and Mastodon works nearly identically as far as alt text is concerned, but I have noticed that something seems to have changed with alt text included in posts form Micro.blog that have ActivityPub enabled, so that Mastodon users follow them directly. I don’t know if this is a change in Mastodon or Micro.blog, but I’m looking into it. If we can control it, we’ll get it fixed as soon as possible.
I am encountering this issue as well, though it isn’t connected to cross-posting yet. I paused setting up cross-posting today when I came across this. But since cross-posting seems to rely on the feeds and the issue seems to be in Mastodon and/or feeds for me, I feel like it may be related. I can create a new topic, though, if you think it might be unrelated.
It appears that images in a post that follow the rule that force a title + link to full post and appear “inline” as a thumbnail do not have alt text, and therefore also doesn’t have alt text when it appears in Mastodon UI.
I’m pulling this feed in on my weblog using sidebar.js which is how I noticed that the thumbnail doesn’t have alt text via the feed. But I also noticed it didn’t have alt text in Mastodon because I follow my micro.blog account.
The feed using sidebar.js on my weblog, the item without the alt text is the one with the small thumbnail of a hydrangea: Apple Annie's Feed on micro.blog
The post on my micro.blog account in the elk.zone web UI as screenshot and markup in both the generic Mastodon web UI and in elk.zone web UI showing no alt text for the image:
This change has been made and will apply to future posts, so that the alt text is preserved for posts with titles that include photos. The alt text should be there both for the “mini” thumbnails on Micro.blog and the full photo when sent to Mastodon.
