Fedi.Tips@FediTips@social.growyourown.services
@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.
Robert Kingett@WeirdWriter@caneandable.social
@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