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   Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:36:13 JST Velocipede Rider

   Ok, yes the full alt text is present apparently. I see it when I inspect the page with dev tools but does not display in its entirety for the tooltip.

   • Embed this notice
     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:35:30 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     • Eystein

     @eys @ruari

     Wow, this is first time I've heard anyone mention this.

     Is there some reason why JAWS does that? Seems a bit of a bad design for a screen reader, to leave out most of the text available?

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     Eystein (eys@front-end.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:35:42 JST Eystein

     in reply to

     @ruari Alt texts should ideally be kept under 125 characters; because JAWS (don’t know about other screen readers) will cut it off at that point. The longdesc attribute is recommended for longer descriptions. Of course, that’s not available in the UI most (any?!) places, so I reckon pasting the whole text in a follow-up toot is sort of a solution.

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     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:44:21 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     • Eystein

     @eys @ruari

     Okay, just based on a nose around the internet, looks like JAWS does show more than 125 characters, but splits it up into 125 character chunks:

     https://terrillthompson.com/tests/altlength.html

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     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:49:17 JST FediTips has moved!

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     • Eystein

     @ruari @eys

     Have consulted and followed a number of blind users on here about best practice for posting, and never heard this ever mentioned.

     I'm wondering if this is something that has entered web design circles a while ago and just stayed there as a rule?

     I just dropped a message to a blind user who has helped me out a lot, I'll see what they have to say.

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 19:49:30 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!
     • Eystein

     @feditips Yeah I need to think about this going forward. I often have long alt text and not just because I include a full copy of written words from a screenshot. Now I am thinking about how I should order things, so that the most relevant part is near the front, so when it is too long, they'll at least get something.

     @eys

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     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:08:02 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     • Eystein

     @eys @ruari

     Yeah, good point! Maybe the difference in the way different tags are treated is a holdover from the days when alt texts were also used as visual placeholders for sighted people? (In the days when images loaded slowly or not at all...)

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     Eystein (eys@front-end.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:08:07 JST Eystein

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!

     @feditips @ruari Thank you for investigating and clearing it up for us!
     I've always worked with the assumption that alt texts should be short and precise - when it was first implemented in browsers it was to describe images rather than transcribe big blocks of screenshotted text 🤷🏻♂️
     There's also the chance that when the alt text replaces a non-loading image, the text might get cut off depending on the width & height of the image it's replacing.

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     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:10:47 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     • Eystein

     @eys @ruari

     Tried to have a look if this issue had been raised before, apparently longdesc is deprecated?

     https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5612

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     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:42:55 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     • Vivaldi Version Tracker
     • Browser Version Tracker ?
     • Ivan Habunek

     @ruari @browserversiontracker @vivaldiversiontracker @ihabunek

     I've mentioned Toot as a command line app, didn't know about the script side of things. Thanks! 🙏

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:43:49 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!
     • Vivaldi Version Tracker
     • Browser Version Tracker ?
     • Ivan Habunek

     A side note @feditips since you write masto tips. Toot is really nice for automating posting from scripts. My @browserversiontracker and @vivaldiversiontracker are basically just short shell scripts powered by cURL to fetch information and Toot to post it.

     With tools like these doing the heavy lifting simple info posting masto bots are pretty straightforward if you have basic command line skils.

     You have probably written about these things before but I mention it nonetheless. 🤷🏼

     @ihabunek

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:44:06 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!
     • Eystein
     • Ivan Habunek

     @feditips I also sometimes use @ihabunek's wonderful Toot TUI masto client from the terminal and appreciate the alt text greatly myself.

     Here is my older post as an example

     https://github.com/ihabunek/toot

     @eys

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:44:12 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!
     • Eystein

     @feditips FWIW I do think a lot of sighted users do use the alt text as well. Images are sometimes deleted from caches on instances. In addition there are extentions and tools built into browsers (including Vivaldi) to prevent loading of images for various reasons. Here is my earlier post, which interestingly shows the entire alt text even though the toltip did not.

     @eys

   • Embed this notice
     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 20:44:20 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!
     • Eystein

     @feditips I now eagerly await a future post on best tips when alt texting from you. 😆

     @eys

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     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 21:31:32 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     @ruari

     Do you have a post about this somewhere I could link to? 😃

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 21:32:16 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!

     @feditips My "bots" (actually just automated posting) are tiny shell scripts run as cron jobs. At set intervals they use cURL to fetch information from the web, extract key values with tools like sed and grep and then post with Toot (if those values have changed since last time).

     I know it is not for everyone but the barrier for entry is fairly low if someone is at all command line savvy.

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 21:32:21 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!
     • Vivaldi Version Tracker
     • Ivan Habunek

     @feditips Well it just makes the posting part really simple as you can just pipe text into it from the command line. Here is a small excerpt from the shell script that posts the @vivaldiversiontracker information.

     @ihabunek

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     FediTips has moved! (feditips@mstdn.social)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 21:39:32 JST FediTips has moved!

     in reply to

     @ruari

     Hahaha, I knew you would bring unusual watches into it 😁

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 21:39:46 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!

     @feditips I can tweak this old script that I used to use on my watch account that posted hourly updates of the time in binary as Christmas trees (lit and unlit).

     Make it into something more useful and embed it in a blog post

     https://gist.github.com/ruario/dcbb5a42df8590cb9bf61e846bba393e

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     Velocipede Rider (ruari@velocipederider.com)'s status on Friday, 01-Sep-2023 21:40:06 JST Velocipede Rider

     in reply to

     • FediTips has moved!

     @feditips I guess I could write a short blog post about it with maybe an example script.