Unlike other places, Mastodon is not “everyone for themselves” and “hey, let’s shitpost about minorities for the lulz”. While Lemmy is trying to be Reddit 2: Electric Boogaloo, Mastodon is trying to be nega-Twitter. Except for Gargron and the other devs who are trying to make Mastodon Twitter with sprinkles.
The Mastodon community is trying hard to make Mastodon feel nice and comfortable and welcoming for everyone, just like Mastodon felt nice and comfortable and welcoming to them after they had freshly arrived from that rampantly ultra-fascist hellhole that’s called 𝕏 now. They’re trying hard, and I mean hard, not to be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or ableist.
This includes lots of things that are completely unthinkable on Reddit because they are technically impossible. Alt-text on images, for example, for which Mastodon offers a whopping 1,500 characters per image. Content warnings for sensitive posts in what’s actually the summary field. Hiding sensitive images which is actually something non-standard and semi-proprietary by Mastodon that hardly anything else out there supports.
Many instances actually make alt-text on images and content warnings for specific topics mandatory in their instance rules. Which topics require CWs partly differ from instance to instance; instances with a focus on neurodivergence/autism, for example, require a CW for eye contact in addition to the usual. Instances only enforce these rules on local users and local posts and not on what’s happening in the federated timeline, but they do have these rules, and they enforce them to the point of permanently banning users.
At the same time, however, these things have become part of Mastodon’s culture. You simply do that stuff, lest you’re at least shunned by “the Mastodon community”. At least. Or you’re being lectured about having to add actually useful alt-text to images and content warnings to sensitive posts. Or you’re muted or blocked outright.
Are there enough users using screenreaders or something so that a missing alt-text catches their attention?
If an image has alt-text, the Web interface shows a little rectangle with “ALT” in it in one corner. Mobile apps tend to do the same. You immediately see upon first glance whether an image has alt-text or not.
Beware if someone catches your post with an image without that “ALT” marker.
Mastodon’s goal, not defined by the devs but by the end users, is for 100% of all images that appear on Mastodon to have alt-text. There are daily stats on which Mastodon instance has how high a percentage of image posts with alt-text. I think mastodon.social, the notorious newbie and “I keep using Mastodon like Twitter” instance, is somewhere between 10% or 20% or so. By Lemmy standards, this may seem mind-boggling high, but by Mastodon standards, it’s embarrassingly low. Some instances reach 80%, and by Mastodon standards, this means there are still 20% image posts that aren’t accessible.
Oh, and there being an “ALT” marker is not enough. If there is an “ALT” marker, people will go check the alt-text. If it doesn’t actually sufficiently describe the image, or if the image is predominantly text, and the alt-text doesn’t contain a full, verbatim transcript, that’s just as bad as there not being any alt-text, and it’s treated just like there was no alt-text.
On Mastodon, alt-text is absolutely. Serious. Muthafscking. Business. Full stop. To the point that you may have mods at your throat if you don’t provide it.
On a side-note, most Mastodon users can’t tell whether a post came from Mastodon or not. They treat posts in their timelines that came from Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp or Friendica or Hubzilla or whatever just like native Mastodon posts. Except for sometimes at least being highly annoyed if a post goes over 500 characters, that is. But they aren’t like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Misskey, and Misskey doesn’t have an alt-text culture,” or like, “Okay, you’re excused for not providing alt-text because you’re on Friendica, and you have to program alt-text into your posts on Friendica, and even that is buggy.”
If your post appears on Mastodon, it’d better integrate with Mastodon’s culture or else. Also, Mastodon users don’t know anything about anything outside Mastodon, neither cultural differences nor technological differences.
Or are these the nerds who use like a Linux command line client and that’s why they rely on proper text descriptions?
My estimation is rather that 70% of all Mastodon users are on iPhones, and 25% are on Android phones, always with dedicated Mastodon apps. Hardly anyone seems to use Mastodon on a computer.
There are actually many blind or visually-impaired Mastodon users. It seems to naturally attract them, just like 𝕏 repels them.
However, there are also people with bad Internet connections for whom images often don’t load at all. Remember that everyone’s on phones, and they don’t have 4G or 5G everywhere.
And there are even people with no disabilities who say that alt-text helps them understand what an image shows. I think that should be the task of explanations in the post because not everyone can access alt-text, but that’ll never be engrained in Mastodon’s culture because you can only explain so much in 500 characters minus hashtags, minus mentions, minus the content warning and minus the actual toot.