Excellent! Would you consider adding Cheddar @fartycheddarcat.bsky to the Cat Starter Pack? They use ALT descriptions on Bluesky and, while small here, they have close to 60,000 followers on the bird site. I follow them in both places and they've been pretty diligent about posting content here. Thx.
Thank you for the resource, and the good reminder to include alt text!! 💖
Is this starter pack something you’ll be updating in the future? Love to be able to refer back to it to check and see if there are new accounts to follow!
Yes, I'll add new accounts every time I find one. There are many cat photo accounts here but unfortunately most of them do not use ALT text - hopefully that will change and I can promote them.
Also acts as a quality filter for shitposters like me. There have been times I've gotten the reminder and I've been like, ehhh honestly not worth putting out in the world
That's really helpful. I hardly ever posted on the bird site and didn't start learning about ALT text until coming to Bluesky. Some people here do an amazing job of capturing the essence of what a photo looks like, but I can certainly learn to improve on my descriptions.
Always amazing to see accessibility in practice!
Just to add with pride another fantastic resource is how to inclusive in alt text: www.makethingsaccessible.com/guides/alter...
"Racial ambiguity" is something I struggle with since a) b&w photography can make it even harder to discern skin tone and b) most of the images I post are of people who are anonymous so I have no way to try to confirm their racial heritage. I just do my best to be mindful and respectful. ☹️
If I hadn't been unpleasantly dragged about ALT text... and humiliated for not having heard about it, I would care.
No matter how disabled you are, nor how badly you've been treated, being rude TO STRANGERS NEVER helps your cause. Give them as much benefit of the doubt as you would want to get.
Sorry that happened to you. The first person who broached the subject with me was quite rude but I don’t think my hurt feelings justify denying accessibility to millions of people who are perfectly nice and did nothing wrong.
That person is long gone. I don’t think they’re following my account and gloating about their triumph. Even if they were, I’m simply not going live my life letting personal spite get in the way of doing the right thing.
When that happened to me, I blocked the dipshit who dragged me, then went back to using ALT text when I can.
There's no reason to not do something nice for others just because someone was a jerk about trying to get you to do it.
Real question: do you know how to describe a picture in a way that would be useful to humans but not as much to an AI? You can be sure that all those nicely labeled pictures are used to train AI models, and I would like to avoid diversion of a disabled-oriented feature for AI benefits if possible.
Yeah I know you can't escape the AI training, even this very thread will probably end up in a dataset sometime, but I kinda feel wrong doing a good job of describing my pictures for people, and other folks taking advantage of that for their profit. I don't work for them, it's not intended for that.
I guess, but it's like refusing to build a wheelchair ramp because you're afraid wasps will nest under it even though the wasps are already literally everywhere. Just fucking over people with disabilities for no reason.
Don't get me wrong, I'll happily continue alt-ing my posts as I usually do, of course it's important to do it. It was just a question following your useful tips on how to redact them.
Not adding alt text doesn’t help you in this context. LLMs are already really good at imagine identification, what they need is more training data to *refine the images of those things they that gen AI models create.* So even posting an imagine without alt text gives them that.
Actually, you can if you are in Europe or the UK. They have GDPR protecting them. We need that too in the US, but will only get it if we unite and keep after our representatives. Throwing up our hands is the death of democracy.
The best thing to do is to use glaze or nightshade on any images you put online, which either makes them useless to AI or actively messes up their systems.
since it's an accessibility feature the most important thing is it's usefulness for someone who needs it...not if your infinite words of wisdom are helping a robot
It's not just a great way to help include people, it also helps with visibility in searches because text search on bsky includes alt text! You're doing good for everyone by adding alt text! Help you and help others!
