@zenmaya@social.zenmaya.xyz @FediTips@social.growyourown.services @vernissage@mastodon.social
It's a tool, and nobody has to use it. I personally love it. Many of my pictures on Vernissage.photos would otherwise have much worse alt text.
@ruanjoma@mas.to @FediTips@social.growyourown.services @vernissage@mastodon.social well alt text isn't for you, its for the visually impaired, and from what ive heard they don't like auto-generated alt texts, because they can generate them as well by their screen readers, the point of alt texts is the human actually typing the text there
@zenmaya@social.zenmaya.xyz @FediTips@social.growyourown.services @vernissage@mastodon.social
Okay, then I didn't understand alt text and wouldn't know what else to write there. I meant it should say what's in the picture 🤷🏼♂️
@ruanjoma@mas.to @FediTips@social.growyourown.services @vernissage@mastodon.social It is, but AI is not 100% correct and users of screen readers can always just generate the description themselves. The point of writing alt text manually is the fact that the author or some other human wrote it to describe the picture. It can add context a machine cannot etc. etc.
@zenmaya@social.zenmaya.xyz @ruanjoma@mas.to @vernissage@mastodon.social
I'm not visually impaired, but going by advice from @WeirdWriter@caneandable.social and others apparently the main problem is AI doesn't have any understanding of anything, it just thoughtlessly describes everything even if it's totally irrelevant, and can hit people with a wall of irrelevant description. It's easier to understand an alt text if a human has written what's actually relevant and significant about the image.
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services @zenmaya@social.zenmaya.xyz @ruanjoma@mas.to @vernissage@mastodon.social Bingo. Do you know if they can use hashtags such as #AltForMe? But you nailed it. We have apps and tools with AI built into the apps and or our screen readers but from my perspective AI alt text is pretty useless. especially since what people usually generate when they generate AI alt text is mostly worse than our apps but in most cases it is exactly what FediTips describes. Yes, it’s giving us information, but is it useful information?
One example I can think of right now is a comic strip described by alt bot. Not only was incorrect by saying there were three panels instead of four panels, it just mindlessly described the panels. It would describe who was in the panels, and it would describe what they were saying, but it described it in such a way to where every panel seem to be very disconnected from the other. The panels were described in verbose detail, but everything was disconnected from each other. Not only that, but I learned later that it didn’t even describe what the characters were doing/wearing, killing the joke. Alt text is just as much an experience as when you took the picture. The alt bot couldn’t make connections from one panel to the other. Each description of the panels was very verbose, yet it left out a lot of crucial information for me to understand the joke, the setting, a lot more things. Personal alt text will always be better because it forces people to live in the moment. It forces people to bring us along with them. Even if they think they’re writing is mediocre or not good enough, I will always get more out of personal alt text
@WeirdWriter@caneandable.social @zenmaya@social.zenmaya.xyz @ruanjoma@mas.to @vernissage@mastodon.social
In a way this is perhaps something that techy sighted people can relate to:
A long time ago I used to handle a lot of tech support calls over the phone, so just audio. I needed people to describe to me what they saw, and the calls worked best when the people described just the relevant details.
AI/LLM alt text is the equivalent of difficult tech support callers who tell you the colour of their computer's mouse but not what is on their screen.
Yep, you nailed it, or if there is an error message on the screen and you tell them, what does the error message say, and they tell you the application that threw up the error message. Is it useful? Yeah. Is it useful in the moment? Not when you wanna know what the actual error message said. Or even better, you asking someone what they did to get that error message and they start describing the hight of the error message dialog box. @FediTips@social.growyourown.services @zenmaya@social.zenmaya.xyz @ruanjoma@mas.to @vernissage@mastodon.social
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