this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Microblog Memes

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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 minutes ago* (last edited 12 minutes ago)

Are there any blind people on Lemmy, screenreading this? I get why alt-text is useful functionally on things like application interfaces, and instructive or educational text, but do you actually enjoy hearing a screen reader say "A meme of four oanels. First panel. An image of a young man in a field. He is Anakin Skywalker as played by that guy who played Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. He says 'bla bla bla'. Next frame. An image of a young woman. She is Padme as played by Natalie Portman. She is smiling. She says "bla bla bla, right?"

[–] [email protected] 33 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

That's amazing. I'd love to hear from one of the audience about how they found the experience.

[–] Chip_Rat 38 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago

Fuck, I laughed, I'm going to hell... Take your upvote

[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Is this a mute/deaf person giving a talk, or a talking/hearing person being incredibly based?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 hours ago

My assumption is the latter, which is awesome.

[–] rtxn 79 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

And to alt-text an embedded image in markdown:

![alt text goes here](url://goes.here)
[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Now this I did not know. Every day's a school day.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I brought mom's brownies for recess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 minutes ago

I accidentally brought the brownies from dads house. We should probably eat these first.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I didn't know you could do that! I'll try it, let me know if it works.

This is the KDE logo.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

FYI alt text only applies when the image fails to load. You can get hover text by adding quoted text after the url.

![alt text](https://url/image.png "hover text")

Preview

KDE Logo alt text

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 hours ago

Alt text is read by screen readers even if the image loads.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

On Eternity, I can see the alt-text when I long-press on the image.

[–] Feathercrown 8 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Neat. For me on mobile, the hover text takes precedence but they both work.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Voyager doesn't seem to use the hover text at all. I think it should though, might make a post about it in their community.

[–] rtxn 2 points 1 hour ago

Markdown features are extremely fragmented. Hover text might be a non-standard feature that not all markdown renderers can handle (or even a standard feature that's omitted in some renderers).

[–] Feathercrown 1 points 2 hours ago

That's interesting. I'm on the default site ui for reference.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 87 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I found that even when you can see the image, alt-text often helps significantly with understanding it. e.g. by calling a character or place by name or saying what kind of action is being done.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (5 children)

The one thing I'm uneasy about with these extremely detailed alt-text descriptions is that it seems like a treasure trove of training data for AI. The main thing holding back image generation is access to well-labelled images. I know it's against ToS to scrape them but that doesn't mean companies can't, just that they shouldn't. Between here and mastadon/etc there's a decent number of very well-labelled images.

[–] pennomi 78 points 4 hours ago

The AI ship has already sailed. No need to harm real humans because somebody might train an AI on your data.

[–] ilinamorato 21 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Honestly I think that sort of training is largely already over. The datasets already exist (have for over a decade now), and are largely self-training at this point. Any training on new images is going to be done by looking at captions under news images, or through crawling videos with voiceovers. I don't think this is a going concern anymore.

And, incidentally, that kind of dataset just isn't very valuable to AI companies. Most of the use they're going to get is in being able to create accessible image descriptions for visually-disabled people anyway; they don't really have a lot more value for generative diffusion models beyond the image itself, since the aforementioned image description models are so good.

In short, I really strongly believe that this isn't a reason to not alt-text your images.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 59 minutes ago

Maybe the AI can alt text it for us.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

AI training data mostly comes from giving exploited Kenyans PTSD, alt-text becoming a common thing on social media came quite a bit after these AI models got their start.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Just be sure not to specify how many fingers, or thumbs, or toes, or that the two shown are opposites L/R. Nor anything about how clown faces are designed.

[–] LePoisson 1 points 3 hours ago

What do you think is creating all those descriptions?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago

It's been great on pixelfed, I appreciate the people that put some time into it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

I usually either write a proper alt-text if it's a non-joke image, or an xkcd style extra joke if it's meant to be a meme.

Well, I do on Mastodon. I know exactly where the button for that is on that platform. Gimme a sec to check where it is on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

In jerboa on android there's a dedicated alt-text field above the "body" field