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Melissa so that those who need alt-text have as much information as possible.
Well, depending on where in the Fediverse you are, a whole lot can be possible.
I tend to make a whole lot of use of my possibilities. Hubzilla, where I am, doesn't have any character limits, at least none worth worrying about.
Sure, depending on your contacts, it makes sense to limit your alt-texts to no more than 1,500 characters because Mastodon, Misskey and their forks chop them off at this length if they're longer. Even Hubzilla itself can no longer fully display alt-texts of over a few thousand characters because they can't be scrolled. And alt-texts of such length are very uncomfortable for screen reader users because screen readers can't navigate alt-text.
But at least for my original images, I also give long image descriptions in the posts themselves in addition to the ones in the alt-texts. And with "long", I mean not "essay", but "short story". "Excessive" if you want.
My personal limit there is 100,000 characters for the whole post. As far as I know, Mastodon rejects longer posts than that entirely, and other Fediverse server apps have even lower limits, so describing my images actually becomes increasingly pointless. But 100,000 characters of description would take me three or four days to research for and write anyway.
Still, while my image posts remain within that limit, I regularly describe and explain my original images in tens of thousands of characters each. I see it as justified, given the very obscure but potentially curiosity-inducing topic. But others may say my long descriptions are way overkill, hardly anyone even reads them because it may pretty well take one hour to do so, and literally nobody actually needs them.
That's why I'm constantly wondering if I'm going overboard with details in my descriptions. Hence the question at the end of my first comment.
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Alan Levine#
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