Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
The accessibility community is pretty divided on AI hype in general and this feature is no exception. Making it easier to add alt is good. But even if the image recognition tech were good enoughāand itās not, yetāgood alt is context dependent and must be human created.
Even if itās just OCR folks are ambivalent. Many assistive techs have native OCR theyāll do automatically, and itās better, usually. But not all, and many AT users donāt know how to access the text recognition them when they have it.
Personally Iād rather improve the ML functionality and UX on the assistive tech side, while improving the ācreate accessible contentā user experiences on the authoring tool side. (Ie. Improve the braille display & screen reader ability to describe the image by putting the ML tech there, but also make it much easier for humans to craft good alt, or video captions, etc.)
I deleted a tweet yesterday about twitter finally allowing alt descriptions on images in 2022 - 25 years after they were added to the w3c spec (7 years before twitter existed) . But I added the point that OCR recommendations for screenshots of text has kinda always been possible, as long as they reliably detect that itās a screenshot of text. But thinking about the politics of that overwhelmed me, hence the delete.
Like, Iām kinda sure they already OCR all the images uploaded for meta info, but the context problem would always be there from an accessibility POV.
My perspective is that without any assistance to people unaware of accessibility issues with images beyond āwould you like to add an alt descriptionā leaves the politics of it all between the people using twitter. I donāt really like seeing people being berated for not adding alt text to their image as if twitter is not the third-party that cultivated a community for 17 years without ALT descriptions, then they suddenly throw them out there and let us deal with it amongst ourselves.
Anywayā¦ I will stick to what I know in future
read that back and itās a bit of an unreadable brain-dump. Apologies if itās nonsense
Yah, this makes sense. Community conventions can encourage good accessible content creation, and software can have affordances to do the same. Twitter, for many years, has been the opposite. Not only did it not allow alt, but the shorthand and memes and joke templates that grew up on short form Twitter was an extremely visual language. Emoji-based ascii art, gifs, animated gifs, gifs framed in emoji captioned by zalgo glitch unicode charactersā¦ thereās HTML that can make all that accessible, in theory, but the problem is more structural than that.