casual constant reminder that alt-text is supposed to describe your image for screen readers. not quite sure how to do that well? here are some great tips from Accessible Social. #alttext #accessibilitytips #accessiblesocial https://www.accessible-social.com/images-and-visuals/writing-image-descriptions

@Lockdownyourlife Camel-case hashtags are apparently friendlier for screen-reader software.
#AccessibilityTips

I love how easy it is to add #AltText to images and videos on Mastodon. Such a big difference to #Twitter. Please consider taking the time to fill it in. It gets faster and easier the more you do it, and it makes a huge difference for folks using screen readers. Also make it a habit to capitalise first letters in hashtags that have multiple words. #Accessibility #AccessibilityTips

If you want to support people who use screen readers, don't boost posts that have images with no image description.

#accessibility #AccessibilityTips #MastodonTips #a11y #mastodon #etiquette #ScreenReaders

Hi ! #AccessibilityMastodon #Accessibility #AccessibilityTips #ScreenReader
When describing images in my native language, how should I format the translations ? I want my photos to be accessible to English and French speaking communities. I was putting French and English one after the other but it does not seem to be a good idea. @Blanche seems to make a separate post with a translation every time. What are your thoughts ? 🤔

@viktorbir @madamscientist @ralf_muschall THANK YOU, Viktor! 🧡 I felt like I was losing my mind!

Most UX designers test across various platforms, but the #fediverse does not.

At least now I know what to expect: #Mastodon #apps won't recognize #CamelCaseHashtags but #screenreaders do.

So all of the #AccessibilityTips recommending #Hashtags using #MixedCaseForScreenReaders face this fundamental problem: they are INaccessible outside the web interface.

#thread

Computers are particularly incompetent at mathematics (as the typesetting of mathematical notation attests). Some blind mathematicians can parse latex through their screen readers, but I wondered how they handled novel notation which doesn't have the necessary code points. I was thinking this morning about Francisco Varela's Extended Calculus of indications. I couldn't find the latex for 'indicated', 'not indicated' and 'autonomous'. What does the blind reader do here?

Second question. This notation is an attempt to coax and construct certain intuitions about biology. I think I can understand a tactile reconstruction of those intuitions but is that what a blind reader of mathematics does?

Sorry for all the dumbness and ignorance, mathematics isn't my thing but I find myself crashing on it's shore. In the distant past I had a job transcribing text for blind students, and I woke up in a panic about it this morning.

#accessibility #accessibilityTips #A11y #blindness #AudioDescription #ScreenReader #ScreenReaders #latex #math #FranciscoVarela

I forgot to add alt text to an image. Thanks to Mastodon’s edit function, I was able to re-add the image and edit in a description to facilitate accessibility 🙏 #AltText #Edit #AccessibilityTips

Web #Accessibility tip no.16

Avoid using tables on websites just for neatness. They don't have navigation so screen readers don't know what direction to read the content.

Consider providing an Excel file but remember not everyone has MS Office. Think about whether the content can be displayed differently.

By adding the Excel file it may be downloaded, edited and redistributed without your permission. #A11y #AccessibilityTips #Inclusive #Wordpress #WebDev

More tips:https://marktomkins.com/more-web-accessibility-tips

@josh Are there any things you recommend specific to writing a Bio? Thank you for these #AccessibilityTips !

I completely missed this till now, but here's where you click to add content warnings and image descriptions:

#introduction #introductions #accessibility #accessibilitytips

I completely missed this till now, but here's where you click to add content warnings and image descriptions:

#introduction #introductions #accessibility #accessibilitytips

Apparently there is a bot you can follow to remind you if you've forgotten to caption your photos and videos

@PleaseCaption

And camel casing hastags (capitalising words in hastags eg #RandomHashTag vs #randomhashtag) helps with pronunciation in screen readers.

#AccessibilityTips #video #photography

#visuallyimpaired #accessibilitytips #accessibility

And since it's just occurred to me that it might not be obvious from that last tweet - Camel Case is where you capitalise each separate word in your hashtags so screen readers etc register them as words and not just a smush of letters #AccessibilityTips #CamelCase

@kirch I was going to record a similar example using Android's #TalkBack "select to speak", but I was surprised to hear it actually pronounced @luka's text correctly.

Of course that is just one out of many #screenreaders available. Another #screenreader someone relies on may indeed pronounce the characters with their original intention instead, as in your linked example.

Aside from people relying on text to speech, it also affects people with for example dyslexia. People might be using a specific font to help them identify letters more easily, and make the text more legible to them; using these glyphs makes that a lot harder.

#AccessibilityTips #accessibility #a11y

@loke you could ask your instance admins to add something like the following #CSS snippet which would add a small whitespace top margin to the image if it's preceded by an empty status text:

.status__content__text:empty + .media-gallery {
  margin-top: 1em;
}

or alternatively if you want to give it a different background color:

.status__content__text:empty + .media-gallery:before {
  height: 1em;
  display: block;
  content: ' ';
  background-color: black;
}

(or add it yourself using a #UserStyle browser extension such as #Stylus)

Though I wish people would just accompany their media with text, not just because of this issue, but also because adding a description of why the image was shared (not just describing the image itself in an alt-text) improves #accessibility quite a bit imho.

#a11y #AccessibilityTips

@nf oh, and a small accessibility tip: you can add an media description to your attached images to help visualise them for those with visual impairment. Apart from that it can also help everyone else to see what they are supposed to see / focus on. :)
In the default Mastodon web interface you do so by clicking on "edit" in the top-right of the image after uploading it. It will open a dialog overlay where you can add an image description, as well as adjust the focal point for the thumbnail.

In your case I would probably have described it as:
"Logo for Slow Craft: stylised white on yellow line-drawing of two people facing each other with a 5-pointed star in between (on top of what I assume resembles a vase or glass?).
Half-circles on top give the impression of hair and beer foam."

#ImageDescriptions #MastoTips #AccessibilityTips

@Leftcel_Infilitrator while @guilevi has already answered your question about how to describe images, I'd like to add some information about hashtags. :)

Hashtags on Mastodon are primarily used for content discovery. Most servers/instances only allow you to search for toots by hashtags as search for any text in the message (often referred to as 'full-text search') is resource intensive.

So, if you want people to find your messages while searching for a specific topic, having the right hashtags in your message is often the only way. Not just for finding other people's messages, but also finding back an earlier status you posted yourself.

What can help people with screenreaders when it comes to hashtags, is to capitalise ever word in compound hashtags; also referred to as camel-casing. For instance, rather than #accessibilitytips, write #AccessibilityTips, as some (most?) screenreaders will use that as a word-boundary hint, and thus allow them to pronounce the hashtag as individual words.

Whether to use inline hashtags, replacing the actual word, or to list them all at the bottom of your post, is a personal preference from what I understood.
If you use a lot of hashtags, I assume a summary at the end rather than inline is probably better, but since I don't use a screenreader myself, I'll defer to the expertise of those that actually do use them.

#accessibility #a11y #hashtags