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With today's update, we've improved the look of the alt text modal you see when composing new posts on #Mastodon, and added some information about the significance of alt text for accessibility and how to write it.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

Why is this so?

Plus it opens in a new window

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to jfor

@fae2535 Because that's how federation works. Your own server may not have seen all the responses from other servers yet. It's a technical limitation of not being a centralised service.
@jfor
in reply to jfor

@fae2535 No worries. It's one of those quirks of the platform - it's not obvious why it'd be that way.

Mastodon isn't "one giant thing" like Twitter. When you post, it takes time for other servers to know about it. Same for replies to posts. Not all servers know about each other, so replies from one of those places might be missing for you - unless you go to the same server as the person who's post you're looking at.

TLDR: A nerdy weirdness of the system.

@jfor
in reply to Matt Wilcox

@mattwilcox

It usedn't to be like that.
I feel that it changed between yesterday and today. But not sure. Thanks!

in reply to jfor

@fae2535 @mattwilcox Probably somebody defederated Mastodon.Social. A lot of administrators are unhappy with moderation on that server, so it gets blocked a lot. Also, some admins block any server that federates with threads, which they do.
in reply to Extra_Special_Carbon

@Extra_Special_Carbon @fae2535 @mattwilcox Wrong, the message is always displayed on remote threads. It says "MAY be missing". In the vast majority of cases, nothing is missing.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

Danke 🙏 Deine/eure Arbeit ist so wichtig (gerade in der aktuellen Lage) :mastolove:
in reply to Eugen Rochko

Great. I saw it yesterday. There wasn't any rectangle covering part of the image.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

If the image is a relatively short text block, why would you summarize it rather than just including the exact text?
in reply to Eugen Rochko

I know he doesn’t have internet but thank John Mastodon for me next time you see him
in reply to Eugen Rochko

it's not just for visual impairment. Someone writing AltText also enables someone who can't understand the language which is in the image to translate it to a language they do understand
in reply to Eugen Rochko

It’s difficult to close the popup. Do you really intend that I scroll to the next toot and click there to make it go away? How about just clicking on the popup to close it? That seems a reasonable choice.
in reply to Fubaroque

@fubaroque Are you referring to the popout pictured in the screenshot? I'm not sure how that fits in with scrolling. There is no scrolling on the modal dialog nor is there a next post to scroll to. You can click anywhere to close it again.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

Indeed how am I supposed to close it? The only way I found is scroll to the next toot and click there.

Like I said how about closing it when I click on the popup itself?

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Eugen Rochko

Someone else said this too, but if there is text in an image, that exact text should be in the alt text, not just a summary of it.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

This is great. I like the focus on summarising, I feel that's a really good approach.
It's much more interesting to me to read/hear what is relevant to the original poster, rather than all little details that can become overwhelming. Thank you for the update.

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