Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar

Gregory J. Rosmaita

@oedipusnj.bsky.social

270 followers 320 following 947 posts

Voice input/output user | Unintelligible at any speed

Accessibility is a human & civil right. Inaccessibility is a choice. YOUR choice.

#AlwaysAddALT #ALT4me #ALT4you

Girlbossed by #BCatPix, who appears in my avatar & banner.

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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At this point, I'm just waiting for the Republican dominated Supreme Court to announce it has overturned Marbury v Madison & dissolved itself

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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🔥 🔥 🐶 "this is fine" 🔥

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Paul Frazee 💥's avatar Paul Frazee 💥 @pfrazee.com
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Last post about the latest update (maybe) If you've been struggling with the size of the "ALT" indicator on images, you can now make it bigger using this setting, under Accessibility

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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In this case it is not the screen reader that is at fault, nor the refreshable braille display, but the person using specific Unicode for stylistic purposes that it is not intended for. This is particularly pernicious in usernames because you have to hear them constantly, simply perusing your TL

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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Any description no matter how delivered is better than none, but to make it impossible to post an image without ALT, go to the settings in BlueSky. There you will find an accessibility heading/link. Follow this, and the first option is to turn the image reminder on.

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Wren, a feral mannequin (is taking a break!)'s avatar Wren, a feral mannequin (is taking a break!) @mannequinrentals.help
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I do always want to recommend looking through this thread though by a totally blind person. His perspective on the purpose of alt text and what kinds of alt text helps him most is illuminating and incredibly important.

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Wren, a feral mannequin (is taking a break!)'s avatar Wren, a feral mannequin (is taking a break!) @mannequinrentals.help
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Don't shy away from describing the colors, either! As Gregory says in the thread linked here, “The majority of people who use ALT will either have seen at some point in their lives or have some residual vision left. Only approximately 18% of us are stereotypically totally blind.”

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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My screenreader is Unicode aware, which means it treats each Unicode symbols as those designated unique code symbols. ANY use of Unicode special symbols for purely stylistic or decorative purposes will be misinterpreted because I will hear every actual short name definition for EVERY character.

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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ALT is, by specification, an attribute, which means that it is delivered to devices that requested as a single string. Screen readers are interpreting the code correctly. The fact is, ALT for image description is ab inelegant clumsy kludge. But it is all we have so we must work with it for now

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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As for the use of AI to obtain descriptions of images – despite what the authors of the HML5 specification claimed when it deprecated LONGDESC – the current state of AI is nowhere near reliable enough to provide reliable results that do not have to be first reviewed by someone with vision.

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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The problem is not in the screen reader but in the use of the ALT attribute from HTML Originally ALT was meant to provide a text thumbnail. There was also an element called LONGDESC, which did not have any of the drawbacks of ALT because it was a block level element that could take structured text.

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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Thanks for the update. Best of luck with the offline issues you're dealing with.

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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Merry Covid Christmas

#WearAMask #CovidForXmas

(Original Caption) 1/11/1940—London, England—Strictly as a gag, these Londoners posed for this picture to show the extent to which air raid precautions in England thwarted the romantic influence of mistletoe around Christmastime.

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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Since today is Thanksgiving here in the States, my human & I want to thank everyone — especially every cat & every other critter & their human — who uses ALT to make social media much much more social for those, like my human, who can't process images.

THANK YOU! 😻😎

#AlwaysAddALT #BCatPix

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Gregory J. Rosmaita's avatar Gregory J. Rosmaita @oedipusnj.bsky.social
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#Blind & #DisabledBlueSky — help an Indian-based researcher explore how Indian social media can address accessibility & how it benefits PWD, especially those using assistive tech &/or special markup & native a11y features to interact with social media by filling out:

forms.gle/g6GU9UUv5hcJ...

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Your Internet Friend Tom Tomorrow's avatar Your Internet Friend Tom Tomorrow @tomtomorrow.bsky.social
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This is just to say I have written yet another  parody of the plum poem which you are probably getting tired of seeing Forgive me It’s just right there So short And so easy

4 replies 16 reposts 107 likes