Today's outrage is text accessibility

[cimorene]

It's not just that images of text are useless for screenreaders, it's also that a huge amount of posts that have no real (or literally no) non-text content are couched in images for no good reason. There's so MUCH of it and they're inconvenient for far more people than just people with screenreaders!

• screengrabs of things like tweets, or worse, screengrabs of long tweet threads that take a whole bunch of phone screenshots


• screenshots of things that aren't tweets where even the image, when viewed actual size, is not actually legible due to the colors and fonts and sizes


• text advice made into comics except it's not actually converted to a comic, it's just handwritten and spread around with a lot of white space and then illustrated a bit, but the illustrations don't really add much of anything and the white space makes the whole thing take up three or four screens of scrolling, while the handwriting is considerably less legible and the white space makes you skip around to read so that it's considerably less readable than a few simple lines of text


• long comics that have actually been made into comics and the point is in dialogue and drawings, but again, they take pages and pages and the art isn't anything special, so that there's no plausible benefit to it being a comic unless they're like trying to trick people who refuse to read information in paragraphs I guess, but like, you're on a blog platform with tons of information in paragraphs anyway?

Just a lot of baffling, seemingly thoughtless inconvenience. Sure, the readers can just choose not to read stuff in horrible formats, which sort of solves the problem at their end (provided they have a way to browse social media that hides excess length posts behind a cut tag), but then that interaction still represents a failure of communication. And if the posters somehow don't consider it a failure of communication - if they're just like "It doesn't bother me at all one way or another whether people read this!" - then they've spent a surprising amount of time posting it, haven't they?

There's a slight exemption for comics people, who conceivably could be interested purely in a demographic of other comics people who prefer to read in a comic format no matter what. I might doubt how much a comic fan gets out of some that seem to me to be barely comics, but I'm clearly not in that bracket so I shouldn't expect to get it.

What if there was an extension that could just completely hide any social media post that was text in an image? I can only dream.

Comments

[redthedragon]

I think the comics thing- especially if they're uniform squares - are usually from people crossposting from Instagram.

It's very annoying, though. I think my "favorite" is like, full text poems without any interesting formatting or w/e screencapped in. Just copy-paste!

[cimorene]

Yes!!! My wife saw an entire short story in the form of screencaps on her timeline today... just... NO!!!!

[yvannairie]

Yeah, tbh, once I started paying attention to this, it's really become... completely impossible to ignore. One explanation for the "why did you screencap this tweet instead of just copy the text?" is that apparently a lot of mobile apps specifically don't allow you to copy text (at least Twitter, Tumblr, Wattpad and maybe Instagram do this) so screencapping becomes your only option, so as far as the accessibility angle of it goes, there's pressure to be exerted on platform holders.

But the "comic that is mostly text with some incidental illustrations" also annoys me, because why wouldn't you just... post the text... and insert the images... At least Tumblr still allows you to do that just fine.

Maybe it's just people's Social Media Brain because social media definitely prefers everything to be image. Images and video and the associated metadata are a lot better for collecting user data because they take so much longer to transfer than text, and because image-format text is what you see, that's what people end up creating because that "looks like" a social media post instead of a news article or a blog post. IDK.

wehs in a general sympathetic way over the loss of text-based media on the internet

[cimorene]

Yeah, I know they do that, so I do kinda understand that it's making it much much easier to use screenshots, since they'd have to extract or transcribe the text. But on the other hand... I kinda feel like iẗ́'s no excuse because most of the time there isn't enough information to be worth digging it out of the accessibility barrier, if you even CAN, and the whole point is that lots of people can't at all so it's just... not there for them!

But yeah, I think you've nailed it. Mindless imitation of what you're used to seeing is how socialization functions at its basic level and how memes spread and unfortunately how many people decide what to say and how to say it, without any further recourse to logic or self-editing and with no thought for accessibility, or sometimes even for the readers, at all.

So this horrible state is a cumulative result of, among other things, the development of web 2.0/the strategies and monetization needs of social media giants, the widely-understood truisms of advertising, the existence/dominance of image-only platforms like Instagram, and human psychology. Railing against the default human psychology may be cathartic, but never effective. Platform and web standards are the only plausible vehicles for change. Which means... not all that hopeful, but at least someone somewhere is bound to be trying?

[yvannairie]

I am crossing my fingers at the way Tumblr is slowly trying to fix its shit and become a competitive blogging platform again, as they've clearly noticed the niche for a heavy-on-text non-social media social space on the internet and are out from under Yahoo which tried to make them into Twitter 2.0

[cimorene]

Well, they do seem to keep making marginal improvements, so all of those are good. I don't think Tumblr is really fixable with marginal improvements all the way, necessarily, but there are lots of those they can make, so... I guess there's plenty of scope!

[alexseanchai]

Twitter and Tumblr apps do allow copying text, though. Twitter is one tweet at a time and Tumblr is one paragraph at a time, so it's nine kinds of frustrating when there's a several-paragraph post or a multi-tweet thread to copy—as I keep finding myself doing because people will insist on screenshotting the tweets to post on Tumblr, thus rendering the entire post nothing but Tumblr image-didn't-load gradients to people with crappy internet, and it's no more legible to screenreader users—but it's possible.

[yvannairie]

Iirc the app doesn't let you copy tags though.

[alexseanchai]

Yes and no? I can copy Tumblr tags fine within the app, provided the only place I want to copy them to is my own tags when I'm reblogging the post. So what I actually end up doing is either copying the URL of whichever post the screenshotted tags originated on to my browser, which gets me where the tags are copyable but only if the Tumblr in question isn't locked to logged-in users only, or deciding it's not worth the hassle.

Sing it

[vass]

Text-as-image that gets routinely resized by the social media forum where it's been posted, so that even if it was readable before, it isn't now.

Text-as-image on information which would be most useful as something to copy and paste, e.g. phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, times and dates.

Information prepared for people with who speak English as a second language, or have cognitive or intellectual disabilities presented as text-as-image clearly because whoever was responsible thought "simple English" means big letters, short words, friendly cartoon graphics, cheerful colours, and leaving out 90% of the information but adding specious reassurances that whatever you want information about is really simple! :-)

Text-as-image that is still l o ooo ooo o o ooo oading.

Text-as-image and they carefully fucked up the HTML/CSS to make sure you can't move the image or resize it or save it without knowing the web design Deep Lore.

Re: Sing it

[cimorene]

And knowing that Tumblr ALWAYS does this to images why would you then post something that won't be legible when it's resized? Or NOT knowing, why wouldn't you CHECK after posting that something is readable????

The ESL thing is just too enraging. The condescending didactic encouraging tone adopted by so much of the Internet, especially the posts that make it big in the Sincere PSA Reblogging Sphere, is bad enough without that special sauce that makes it vaguely xenophobic and simultaneously completely self-defeating because its style renders it less useful and accessible than it would have been before.

[mecurtin]

This is a big reason I'm only very inconsistently on Tumblr.

I made a rule for myself that I'd only reblog a post like that if there's alt text or an image description, otherwise I have to add it myself .. and the upshot is I don't reblog much, it just seems like so much WORK.