Cimorene

I did check it and skim through it, but I don't have a way to more thoroughly check.

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.

A couple of days after the US election, I started following every link from a political retweeter that said anything about someone else I should follow. I didn't subscribe to absolutely all of the accounts, but I did end up following a number of journalists, activists, historians and other scholars and experts in fascism, religious authoritarianism, kleptocracy, Russia, and US politics. And also a few focused on global warming and carbon tax.

The result made my timeline so high-volume that I rarely actually manage to backread the whole thing anymore, and I had to create separate lists for Serious and Fun/Fannish stuff. Here's my 14-member Anti-Fascist Twitter feed, which (kind of sadly) updates way way faster than my personal fannish list.

I've also had an increasing number of complete strangers follow me since I started all the political retweeting - complete strangers with primarily political interest it seems, I mean. I'm not exactly comfortable with that, but I think it's too late to really do anything. I could protect my account, but that seems silly, because the stuff isn't exactly private or worthy of keeping secret, just... I never really had to worry about anyone being interested enough to accidentally see it before?

I could make a separate Twitter account for that stuff, but a) it's a bit late because I already have all these complete strangers following my personal one with its tweets about fanfiction and hockey gay porn jokes??? and b) I kind of resist doing that, not philosophically, exactly, just... kinda worried it would be too fiddly and I'd end up messing it up.

But my main concern with that is that I don't have any sort of expertise, unlike pretty much every account on that list above, and I'm also not producing any original content to speak of, so... ? I'm not even attempting to exercise any sort of expertise at curation of retweets, not that I'm claiming to have any in the first place. I have tweeted suggestions of experts to follow a couple of times, but reiterating it regularly would get pretty tiresome so I have restrained myself.

So in the meantime I just kind of hang out here, remaining uncomfortable every time I get a new couple of follow notifications.