@Megan Lynch (she/her) @Max Leibman It all depends on how you describe your images and how many. For example, there's a huge difference between occasionally posting one picture and churning out dozens of picture posts at a time, one every few minutes.
Also, if you only do the bare minimum in not even 150 characters, it may be fairly easy.
Poetic or whimsical image descriptions could be fun. I don't know, I don't do that.
But it's a wholly different story if you really want to go by the book. If you've studied alt-text and image description guidelines such as the Cooper Hewitt Guidelines for Image Description and the many posts on alt-texts and image descriptions by Veronica With Four Eyes, and your goal is to fulfill them all to a tee. If you're shooting for perfection in accessibility. If, for example, you take care of details such as not using line breaks or the quotation marks on your keyboard in alt-text. If you actually worry about whether or not to mention the races and genders of people in your images. If, whenever you mention a detail in one of your images, you wonder if you can really assume that everyone knows what it looks like anyway, and whether or not you should better describe what it looks like.
Then it becomes work.
It becomes even more work if your images don't fall into any of the categories that those had in mind who wrote all those image description guidelines, and the context of your images doesn't either. For that doesn't give you a justification to wing it. Instead, you somehow have to apply the existing rules and guidelines plus what blind or visually-impaired Fediverse users say they need to your niche content.
"Write alt-texts for your images," they say. "It's fun, and it only takes a few seconds," they say. In the meantime, it takes me hours to describe one deliberately simple image and days, morning to evening, to describe a more complex one with more surrounding. The results are the longest and most detailed image descriptions in the Fediverse by far. And yet, within a few months, I'll declare them obsolete because I've learned something new again that I haven't applied to them, for example, how to describe colours or dimensions correctly. Not to mention that I constantly have to cope with not being able to make my image posts perfectly accessible to absolutely everyone: I can't describe and explain my images at the level of detail that some people may need, seeing as how obscure the general topic of my images is, while at the same time keeping the descriptions as short as others need them.
You can't say that this is not work.
CC: @Different Than @billy joe bowers-🇺🇦
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
#ImageDescription
@Michael Hanscom Out of curiosity, and to be on the safe side and improve my own image descriptions further: What makes alt-text bad in your opinion? Only when it's rubbish that doesn't have anything to do with the image?
Or is it bad when it isn't accurate enough? When it isn't detailed enough/when certain details that you think should be described are missing? When it's too detailed? When it describes the wrong details?
Is it bad when elements in the image are described the wrong way? When (for any definition of person) a person's skin colour is mentioned rather their race or vice versa, whichever you think is correct? When a person's gender is mentioned although whoever described the image can't know it with absolute certainty? When a shade of a colour is mentioned by name rather than being described?
Is it bad when it doesn't explain what you don't understand in such a way that you understand the image without having to look anything up yourself? Or is it bad when it does explain the image because explanations do not belong into the alt-text (I'm being serious, they actually don't)?
Is it bad when, while getting everything else right, it doesn't contain verbatim transcripts of any and all text in the image? What if there are transcripts in the post text body instead? Is it bad when text is transcribed which you think should not be transcribed, whichever that may be? Is it bad when text in a foreign language is transcribed verbatim in that language and then translated as literally as possible instead of translating it right away?
Or do you have other criteria that I don't know about and I haven't thought of yet?
When is alt-text so bad that it justifies both mocking and writing a replacement?
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Or is it bad when it isn't accurate enough? When it isn't detailed enough/when certain details that you think should be described are missing? When it's too detailed? When it describes the wrong details?
Is it bad when elements in the image are described the wrong way? When (for any definition of person) a person's skin colour is mentioned rather their race or vice versa, whichever you think is correct? When a person's gender is mentioned although whoever described the image can't know it with absolute certainty? When a shade of a colour is mentioned by name rather than being described?
Is it bad when it doesn't explain what you don't understand in such a way that you understand the image without having to look anything up yourself? Or is it bad when it does explain the image because explanations do not belong into the alt-text (I'm being serious, they actually don't)?
Is it bad when, while getting everything else right, it doesn't contain verbatim transcripts of any and all text in the image? What if there are transcripts in the post text body instead? Is it bad when text is transcribed which you think should not be transcribed, whichever that may be? Is it bad when text in a foreign language is transcribed verbatim in that language and then translated as literally as possible instead of translating it right away?
Or do you have other criteria that I don't know about and I haven't thought of yet?
When is alt-text so bad that it justifies both mocking and writing a replacement?
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@Justin Derrick The question, however, is: What is "high-quality"? How is it defined?
Would the bot go by the definition valid for commercial/scientific/technological websites and blogs, i.e. ideally no more than 125 characters, and only a short and concise visual description with no further information?
Or would the bot go by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's standards, i.e. the longer and more detailed, the better, any and all extra information is welcome in alt-text (because it doesn't fit into the toot), and the limit is 1,500 characters?
That is, if it were for me, the bot would go look both for alt-texts and for image descriptions in the post text body and judge both. Because I do both at the same time for my original images. An extremely detailed long image description in the post itself (character limit for post and alt-texts combined here: over 16 million) that also comes with all necessary explanations and transcripts of all text in the image, plus an alt-text that's as detailed as 1,500 characters (minus notification about the long description in the post) allow, but with no explanations, and I usually have to leave out text transcripts as well because they're too many.
You may say the alt-text is superfluous if it's just a much shorter version of the long description. But as long as the Mastodon HOA demands there be an alt-text to every image, no matter what (especially seeing as I always hide my image posts behind summaries/content warnings, so you can't see right of the bat that there's a long image description in the post), I add alt-texts to my original images.
I'm actually curious about how the bot would judge my descriptions. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it notices that the bits of text in the image are not transcribed in the alt-text. Maybe it'd be irritated because I have headlines in my long image descriptions, because they're so long that they need two levels of headlines. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it goes strictly by WCAG, and a) the alt-texts exceed 200 characters, b) long image descriptions do not belong into the text body by any known official accessibility standards, and c) neither my alt-texts nor my long descriptions are limited to what's supposed to be important within the context of the post.
Anyway, in the meantime, you can follow the account @Alt Text Hall of Fame and the hashtag #AltTextHallOfFame.
CC: @Simon Brooke
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #MastodonHOA #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Would the bot go by the definition valid for commercial/scientific/technological websites and blogs, i.e. ideally no more than 125 characters, and only a short and concise visual description with no further information?
Or would the bot go by Mastodon's culture and Mastodon's standards, i.e. the longer and more detailed, the better, any and all extra information is welcome in alt-text (because it doesn't fit into the toot), and the limit is 1,500 characters?
That is, if it were for me, the bot would go look both for alt-texts and for image descriptions in the post text body and judge both. Because I do both at the same time for my original images. An extremely detailed long image description in the post itself (character limit for post and alt-texts combined here: over 16 million) that also comes with all necessary explanations and transcripts of all text in the image, plus an alt-text that's as detailed as 1,500 characters (minus notification about the long description in the post) allow, but with no explanations, and I usually have to leave out text transcripts as well because they're too many.
You may say the alt-text is superfluous if it's just a much shorter version of the long description. But as long as the Mastodon HOA demands there be an alt-text to every image, no matter what (especially seeing as I always hide my image posts behind summaries/content warnings, so you can't see right of the bat that there's a long image description in the post), I add alt-texts to my original images.
I'm actually curious about how the bot would judge my descriptions. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it notices that the bits of text in the image are not transcribed in the alt-text. Maybe it'd be irritated because I have headlines in my long image descriptions, because they're so long that they need two levels of headlines. Maybe it'd flag them "inadequate" because it goes strictly by WCAG, and a) the alt-texts exceed 200 characters, b) long image descriptions do not belong into the text body by any known official accessibility standards, and c) neither my alt-texts nor my long descriptions are limited to what's supposed to be important within the context of the post.
Anyway, in the meantime, you can follow the account @Alt Text Hall of Fame and the hashtag #AltTextHallOfFame.
CC: @Simon Brooke
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #MastodonHOA #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@EricAlper yes please...
(Also please add #AltText / #ImageDescription)...
@Georgiana Brummell Well, when I describe my images, I have to assume four things.
One, nobody in the Fediverse is even remotely familiar with anything in my images. So what I can't assume is that anyone knows anything about my images anyway, and that it needs no description.
Two, someone somewhere out there might stumble upon my virtual world image posts and end up totally excited because they're proof that the so-called metaverse is, in fact, not dead. And as excited they are, they're also curious about these virtual worlds. Even if they're blind. This means that even if my images focus on something specific, they're just as curious about the whole surroundings.
Three, blind and visually-impaired people want to have the exact same chances at experiencing images as fully sighted people. Now, when someone fully sighted stumbles upon one of my virtual world images for the first time, do you really think they only look at what I say is important in the image? Of course not. Instead, they go on a discovery journey through a whole new and completely unknown universe. They take in all the big and small details in the image, whether these details matter in the context of the post or not.
Well, and I have to assume that blind or visually-impaired people want to have a chance to do the exact same thing. But in order for them to be able to do that, I have to help them by describing all the big and small things.
Four, when I mention something in my images, and someone doesn't know what it looks like, and they can't see it, they want to know what it looks like. Not describing them would be lazy, selfish and ableist. And having blind or visually-impaired users ask me about details is just as ableist. They don't want to have to ask. They want to be told right away. I mean, otherwise I wouldn't have to describe my images at all. If someone wants to know what they show, they can ask, right?
And so I have to describe my images at an extremely high level of detail.
In addition, I have to explain my images so that people understand the image description. I'm currently working on a series of virtual fashion portraits, so-to-speak, so they need tremendously detailed descriptions of the avatar. But nobody will understand the descriptions if I don't explain everything from the ground up.
So right now, the long image description starts with some 12,000 characters of explanations in the preamble before any visuals are described. It'd be even more if I had to explain the location where I've taken the images. But I hope I can safely assume that nobody wants to know where the images were taken if the entire background is a neutral, featureless white.
I guess things would be much easier if discussion groups had always been an integral part of the whole Fediverse, including Mastodon, and not just a fringe phenomenon that nobody knows about.
There could be a group about accessibility in the Fediverse, populated by online accessibility experts, by actually blind or visually-impaired people, by people who are both like Veronica with Four Eyes and by Fediverse users who want to get their image descriptions as right as possible. They could all discuss things not only with the thread starters, but with one another.
I could go there and ask the questions I have, and I actually have many questions. And people wouldn't just answer me independently from one another. They would see everyone else's answers and comment on these. They would start discussing the topics amongst one another from different points of view to find the best solution, the best answer.
But I can't do that because there are no such discussion groups, and everyone is in places that neither have nor support groups in the first place.
The best I can do is ask a question and then mass-mention not only Guppe groups on accessibility, but also a bunch of Fediverse users of whom I know that they are blind or visually-impaired. Unfortunately, Veronica with Four Eyes, a proponent of describing all images twice like I do, is not even active in the Fediverse, if she's there at all.
I've done that last year when I needed to know if I have to describe what the herringbone fabric pattern looks like or what a full brogue shoe looks like in general and what a specific full brogue shoe looks like in particular, or whether I can assume that to be known. I think I got three independent replies although, fortunately, everyone mentioned each other. They said that I don't have to describe them, and one or two said that I can safely assume that people know what I mean if I just drop the names.
Right now I'm wondering if I can safely assume that everyone knows what the three lions in the Royal Arms of England look like, or whether they need their own detail description. I have to deal with a number of sports jackets with the three lions on the buttons, that's why. And in fact, the buttons are so small in the images that even sighted people can't see the three lions on them.
Also, I'm wondering if everyone is familiar with the term "shank button", or whether that requires an explanation, too.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta
One, nobody in the Fediverse is even remotely familiar with anything in my images. So what I can't assume is that anyone knows anything about my images anyway, and that it needs no description.
Two, someone somewhere out there might stumble upon my virtual world image posts and end up totally excited because they're proof that the so-called metaverse is, in fact, not dead. And as excited they are, they're also curious about these virtual worlds. Even if they're blind. This means that even if my images focus on something specific, they're just as curious about the whole surroundings.
Three, blind and visually-impaired people want to have the exact same chances at experiencing images as fully sighted people. Now, when someone fully sighted stumbles upon one of my virtual world images for the first time, do you really think they only look at what I say is important in the image? Of course not. Instead, they go on a discovery journey through a whole new and completely unknown universe. They take in all the big and small details in the image, whether these details matter in the context of the post or not.
Well, and I have to assume that blind or visually-impaired people want to have a chance to do the exact same thing. But in order for them to be able to do that, I have to help them by describing all the big and small things.
Four, when I mention something in my images, and someone doesn't know what it looks like, and they can't see it, they want to know what it looks like. Not describing them would be lazy, selfish and ableist. And having blind or visually-impaired users ask me about details is just as ableist. They don't want to have to ask. They want to be told right away. I mean, otherwise I wouldn't have to describe my images at all. If someone wants to know what they show, they can ask, right?
And so I have to describe my images at an extremely high level of detail.
In addition, I have to explain my images so that people understand the image description. I'm currently working on a series of virtual fashion portraits, so-to-speak, so they need tremendously detailed descriptions of the avatar. But nobody will understand the descriptions if I don't explain everything from the ground up.
So right now, the long image description starts with some 12,000 characters of explanations in the preamble before any visuals are described. It'd be even more if I had to explain the location where I've taken the images. But I hope I can safely assume that nobody wants to know where the images were taken if the entire background is a neutral, featureless white.
I guess things would be much easier if discussion groups had always been an integral part of the whole Fediverse, including Mastodon, and not just a fringe phenomenon that nobody knows about.
There could be a group about accessibility in the Fediverse, populated by online accessibility experts, by actually blind or visually-impaired people, by people who are both like Veronica with Four Eyes and by Fediverse users who want to get their image descriptions as right as possible. They could all discuss things not only with the thread starters, but with one another.
I could go there and ask the questions I have, and I actually have many questions. And people wouldn't just answer me independently from one another. They would see everyone else's answers and comment on these. They would start discussing the topics amongst one another from different points of view to find the best solution, the best answer.
But I can't do that because there are no such discussion groups, and everyone is in places that neither have nor support groups in the first place.
The best I can do is ask a question and then mass-mention not only Guppe groups on accessibility, but also a bunch of Fediverse users of whom I know that they are blind or visually-impaired. Unfortunately, Veronica with Four Eyes, a proponent of describing all images twice like I do, is not even active in the Fediverse, if she's there at all.
I've done that last year when I needed to know if I have to describe what the herringbone fabric pattern looks like or what a full brogue shoe looks like in general and what a specific full brogue shoe looks like in particular, or whether I can assume that to be known. I think I got three independent replies although, fortunately, everyone mentioned each other. They said that I don't have to describe them, and one or two said that I can safely assume that people know what I mean if I just drop the names.
Right now I'm wondering if I can safely assume that everyone knows what the three lions in the Royal Arms of England look like, or whether they need their own detail description. I have to deal with a number of sports jackets with the three lions on the buttons, that's why. And in fact, the buttons are so small in the images that even sighted people can't see the three lions on them.
Also, I'm wondering if everyone is familiar with the term "shank button", or whether that requires an explanation, too.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta
(This is technically a repost of this post, but with "unseen" images for the Unseen Image Challenge by @Altbot, a modified post text and an upgraded set of long image descriptions. I didn't have time to complete the descriptions for a set of wholly new images.)
OSgrid is probably the oldest 3-D virtual world based on free and open-source software (OpenSimulator) and run by community members. It's definitely the oldest 3-D virtual world that's federated with other virtual worlds.
These images are from OSgrid's 17th birthday celebration in July, 2024.
My little in-world sister @Juno Rowland, part-time OSgrid resident just like myself, celebrated the grid birthday with outfits based on the officially-issued women's tank tops. The first image shows her wearing one of these outfits on her pier at her now-soon-to-disappear home at Tropicana Tuneage on Friday, July 26th. She had been around the birthday sims on Thursday already, but in a different skirt. On Friday, she posed in one that's much easier for me to describe in front of a background that's a great deal easier to describe than the anniversary sims.
One day later, on Saturday, July 27th, she went and revisited the birthday exhibitions, also to see one of her favourite things, a Leonard Cohen album cover at an exhibition. The second image is from there.
Both images in this post are digital renderings from inside a 3-D virtual world, using shaders, simplified real-time reflections and an artificial sun as a directed light source for illuminating the scenery and casting shadows, but without ray-tracing. It shows a digital avatar made to look like a fairly young woman. In the first image, she is standing at the end of a wooden pier. In the second image, she is standing next to a painted portrait of Leonard Cohen which he has used as an album cover.
The images were created in two different places in OSgrid, known as sims. Both are linked to the 17th anniversary of OSgrid which was celebrated from July 22th to July 28th, 2024.
OSgrid is a virtual world, a so-called "grid", based on a virtual-world engine named OpenSimulator. OpenSimulator, OpenSim in short, is a free, open-source, server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life. It is not affiliated with Linden Lab, the creators and owners of Second Life.
Second Life is a centralised, commercial 3-D virtual world launched in 2003. It experienced a big hype starting in 2007 which faded away in 2008. It still exists, it is constantly evolving, and it is celebrating its 21st anniversary this month.
The development of OpenSim started in 2006, originally under the name of OpenSecondLife, then OpenSL, by reverse-engineering Second Life's viewer API and building a virtual world server against it. In early 2007, Linden Lab laid open the source code of the official Second Life viewer, the client application needed to access Second Life. This revealed large parts of Second Life's technology and made not only the development of third-party viewers possible, but also facilitatted OpenSim's development. It was also in early 2007 that the first test version of OpenSim came out.
Second Life, as well as the worlds based on OpenSimulator, are referred to as "grids" because they are split into square regions of 256 by 256 metres or roughly 280 by 280 yards. This roughly corresponds to a bit more than three by two major-league football pitches or soccer fields or a bit less than three by two American football fields.
While Second Life is a walled garden with only one publicly accessible grid that is connected to nothing else, OpenSimulator can be used by just about anyone to create and run their own grid. In 2008, a new feature called the Hypergrid was introduced that allows avatars registered on one grid to visit other grids. Thus, OpenSim is not only decentralised, but actually mostly federated. There are currently over 3,000 active grids, maybe over 4,000, and especially most of the larger public grids are connected to the Hypergrid.
Sims, in turn, are short for simulators which have to run in regions for any kind of content to be able to exist in them and for avatars to be able to enter them. In Second Life, one sim always covers one region. OpenSim has so-called varsims which can cover multiple regions arranged in a square without having borders between the regions. The upper limit imposed by the software is 32 by 32 or 1,024 regions, but anything significantly larger than 16 by 16 or 256 regions has been proven to be highly impractical.
OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid. It was launched in July, 2007, as a proving ground for OpenSim's own development which it still is. Nonetheless, it was the first OpenSim grid to surpass Second Life in land area, and it currently is one out of two grids to have done so. Also, as early as 2007 already, OSgrid referred to OpenSim in general and then, by 2008, to itself as "the Open Source Metaverse". It has used this term for an actual virtual world 14 years earlier than Mark Zuckerberg. For about just as long, the word "metaverse" has been part of the standard vocabulary in the OpenSim community.
The avatar shown in the image is Juno Rowland. She is, in fact, a backup avatar for my female alt, short for alternate avatar, that goes by the same name and looks the same while being at home on another grid.
Juno is built to look like a young woman. OpenSim does not explicitly support different ethnicities, but the basic avatar-building components available in OpenSim are almost exclusively geared towards avatars looking white or Latin American and in the 30s at most. She is 1.74 metres or 5 feet 8 1/2 inches tall which is taller than the average real-life Western woman by about the length of an adult person's palm. She is fairly slim which is somewhat concealed by the loose fit of her clothes.
Juno's skin textures are light to medium-light. Highlights and partly also shades are part of the skin textures, but very subdued. Most shading on her is created by the shader built into the viewer.
She has brown eyes and black hair worn as a rather short bob that narrows downward from where her ears are and extends to a height halfway between her chin and her shoulders. Her bangs cover her forehead entirely. Strands of her bangs partly cover her eyebrows, and two of them extend down as far as her upper eyelids. On each side, a single thick lock extends forward and slightly inward. These locks occasionally cover parts of her lower cheeks.
Juno is wearing a loose-fitting black tank top with the official logo of the 17th grid birthday festivities on it. The logo stretches across about 90% of Juno's chest and from slightly higher than right below her breasts to slightly higher than the middle of the front of the shirt.
In the top left corner of the birthday logo, there is the OSgrid logo. It consists of five identical parallelograms. Each one of them resembles a rectangle which, when placed horizontally, has its short edges tilted to the right by 18 degrees. The long edges are longer than the short edges by about three quarters. These five parallelograms are arranged around a common centre at the same distance and at angles of 72 degrees from each other. There is always one pointed angle slipping under the long side of a neighbouring parallelogram. This way, the gap in the middle between the parallelograms is a five-point star. The outer short edge of each parallelogram is farther away from the centre than the parallel long edge of the neighbouring parallelogram by a bit over half the latter's width. The top right parallelogram is placed exactly vertically.
The whole logo has a light, yellowish orange tint. Size-wise, it takes up a bit more than 20% of the width and about 70% of the height of the entire birthday logo.
To the right of the OSgrid logo, there is the name of the grid, "OSgrid", written in all capitals in the same tint of orange as the OSgrid logo. The writing is about two thirds as tall as each parallelogram in the OSgrid logo is long. It starts to the right of the vertical top right parallelogram at roughly 80% of its width, and the top of the letters is slightly higher than the obtuse top right corner of the top right parallelogram. The typeface used is a heavy variant of the Futura typeface, a geometric sans-serif typeface known for fairly small lower-case characters and a lower-case "a" which is like a "d" with a shorter line, much like in hand-writing.
Right below, "The Open Source Metaverse" is written at a vertical distance that is roughly the same as the general thickness of the letters in the "OSgrid" writing. All four words start with capitals. The writing lines up with the "OSgrid" writing to the left. The typeface is the same as the one used for the "OSgrid" writing, only smaller by about 60%. It is small enough to not be easily readable in the image at the resolution at which the image was posted. The writing is tinted a light grey, resembling aluminium.
Most of the lower half is taken up by a horizontal rectangle, tinted a darker, slightly less saturated, slightly more brownish tone of orange. To the left, it lines up with the bottom pointy-angled corner of the bottom left parallelogram in the logo. To the right, it lines up with the end of the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". At the top, it almost touches the vertical line of the "p" in the same writing.
On this rectangle, "17th Birthday" is written in the same black as the rest of the tank top and the same typeface as the other two writings, but twice the height as the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". Vertically, this writing is slightly above the middle of the rectangle. Horizontally, it lines up with the other two writings on the left.
Below the tank top, Juno is wearing a straight, loose-fitting miniskirt which ends roughly the length of one of her hands above her knees. Its texture gives it a look like washed-out denim in various shades of slightly yellowish, medium-light-to-medium brown. Seams, pockets and the fly are all only part of the texture. The pocket on the front to the left from Juno's point of view is completely covered by the tank top, the pocket on the other side is mostly covered. The texture does not emulate any rear pockets.
Apart from the skirt, Juno's legs are bare. On her feet, she is wearing a pair of flat ballet shoes which mostly show a black texture, slightly lighter than the tank top, with a structure that resembles an unidentified fabric. The insides of the shoes are a medium-light, shaded tone of brown, suggesting some fabric or thin leather again. The soles are a medium-light, slightly reddish brown. They have very low heels.
Around her neck, Juno is wearing a necklace consisting what appears to be a single wire of solid gold of a similar thickness as the material used for clothes hangers plus an OSgrid logo made of gold as well. The logo is a bit over half as big as the one on her tank top. The eye through which the wire runs is attached near one of the outer obtuse-angled corners, so the logo is rotated to the left in comparison with the one on the tank top. Both the wire and the logo are glossy, the logo more than the wire, but the material appearance is textured onto both.
In both Second Life and OpenSim-based worlds, unlike most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars are not only highly configurable in-world, but also highly modular. Everything on Juno is an attachment. Her body is an attachment, the head included. Her feet are a separate attachment; different feet for medium and high heels are available. The skin textures can be replaced, and standard skins can be worn on this body. The eye texture can be replaced, too. Eyelashes, fingernails and toenails are attachments, although the latter are fully concealed inside her shoes. Her hair is an attachment. The top, the skirt, each shoe and the necklace are separate attachments which makes it possible for her to wear all kinds of outfits. Her shape is configurable with over 80 parameters, and even that can be replaced with another one which is usually just as configurable.
Everything that Juno is made up from was made by users. Everything else, including the purpose-made texture on the tank top, was made directly for OpenSim.
The first image was created on a sim called Tropicana Tuneage, a multi-purpose sim which is regularly used for events, but which is also Juno's home in OSgrid.
The scenery is limited to a wooden pier which Juno is standing on. It takes up the lower 45% of the image. Its water-side end would line up with the lower side of Juno's butt if she was shown from behind. The top surface of the pier is textured in a way that suggests wooden planks that run transversally across the pier. The wood is very slightly less yellowish tone of brown than Juno's skirt and varies greatly between light-medium, almost light, and medium. The sides of the pier are outside the borders of the image.
The pier leads to the southwest. The camera angle follows it almost exactly in parallel. It is oriented farther to the right by about one degree. It is also roughly at the height of Juno's waist.
Beyond the pier and behind Juno, there is nothing but blue sea with gentle waves on it. The tone of blue has a fairly low saturation, and some of the waves are partly almost medium-dark grey. The horizon is at almost precisely two thirds of the height of the image, roughly below Juno's breasts, which shows that the camera is tilted downward by a few degrees.
The sky is a very pale, greenish blue with a very faint gradient towards the horizon that suggests haze. To Juno's right, there are some thin clouds which increasingly blend in with the sky, the lower they are. A bit of cloud is above her head as well. There are no clouds to her left.
Juno is slightly left of centre, standing on her right foot while moving her left foot forward and turning it to the left. She is about to turn herself around. Her arms are on her sides, the left arm is moved a bit forward. Her hands are relaxed with both middle fingers bent inward a little more than the other fingers.
Juno's face is expressionless. Any expressions would require specific animations to be played, mostly manually which would be an extra effort. She is looking past a point slightly above the camera.
Her hair is fully covering her ears. The lock on the left of her face, the right for the on-looker, is in front of the lower parts of her cheek. So is the lock on the other side, but less so.
The simulated time of day is late afternoon. The sun is quite low already in the west. This can be told by the shadows which Juno's legs cast on the wooden planks texture on the pier as well as some narrow highlights on her neck, her arms and her legs. The sun itself is not in the image.
Apart from the sun, there is medium grey ambient light that shines the same from everywhere and therefore doesn't create any shadows.
Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.
The second image was created in a different place on the same grid named OSG17B2. The name refers to OSgrid's 17th birthday, OSG17B in short. It is the second one of four numbered exhibition sims created for the birthday, two of which were opened to the public while the other two remain unused.
In the second image, Juno is inside a building used as a gallery of music album covers.
Most of the right-hand 60% of the image are taken up by an art easel. It is about one and two thirds times as high as Juno is tall while appearing smaller due to the perspective. It is rotated to the right from the camera being directly aimed at its front by about 25 degrees.
The easel is a fairly stable and elaborate construction which looks like it is adjustable for various canvas sizes. Below where the canvas would be put, there is a shelf for painting utensils. The easel is mostly white with no texture on it. The exceptions are eleven slotted screw heads and a handle roughly shaped like a six-point star with which the easel can be adjusted to different canvas sizes. They have metal-like, partly light grey, partly light yellowish or brownish textures with medium-light orange spots hinting at corrosion. These textures include highlights and shading. The parts themselves are not shiny. Of the screw heads, only five are unobscured. One is holding the adjustment handle in place. Three are holding the almost vertical part of the easel together, one close to the top, two near the bottom. The fifth one connects the right-hand rear support to the foot.
The easel is adjusted for something way bigger than what it is carrying. It's the cover of the album Recent Songs by the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. It was released in 1979 as his sixth studio album, and it is not known for high-charting single releases. The cover is about half as high as Juno is tall. Again, due to the perspective, it appears to be smaller. Its aspect ratio is very slightly warped, it is a little wider than it is high.
The album cover is based on a frontal facial portrait painting of Cohen by Dianne Lawrence. It shows him as a middle-aged, light-skinned man with green eyes and black, medium-short hair which he wears in a somewhat asymmetrical hairdo that is slightly fuller on his left, the on-looker's right, than on the other side. The top of his hair is cut off by the top edge of the canvas. At the bottom, the portrait ends at Cohen's shoulders. He is wearing a black shirt which lacks too many details to be identifiable any further.
The background behind him is a solid, slightly pale medium blue with a minimal hint of green.
Above his right shoulder, his left shoulder from the on-looker's point of view, there is a drawing of a hummingbird which is only black and background blue and about as long from beak to tail feathers as Cohen's mouth is wide. The bird seems to be hovering above his shoulder with no intention to touch down. Its beak is oriented to the right for the on-looker and tilted slightly downward to between Cohen's shoulder and the collar of his shirt.
Between the top left corner and Cohen's hair, his name is written, "Leonard Cohen". Likewise, between his hair and the top right corner, the title of the album is written, "Recent Songs". Both are in black, fairly small, in an unidentified, very heavy geometric sans-serif typeface and in all-caps.
The narrow right-hand side of the box that has the portrait on its front has a medium-dark wood texture, slightly reddish, slightly greyish, with the grain perpendicular to the long edges.
The wall behind the easel is mostly white with a black circular pattern on it. It consists of 39 concentric circles whose thickness increase from the outermost to the innermost circle. Instead of a 40th circle, there is a dot in the centre which is a little bigger than the thickness of the innermost circle. The texture itself is a bit over one and a half times as high as Juno is tall and twice as wide as it is high. Thus, it has ample of white space on both sides whereas the outermost 16 circles are more or less cut at the top and the bottom. Two of these patterns are within the border of the image above one another. The upper one is cut off by the upper edge of the image in such a way that only the two innermost circles are complete.
The wall makes up a bit less than the upper two thirds of the background of the image. Apart from Juno and the easel, everything below is ground. The edge between the wall and the floor shows that the camera is rotated from being perpendicular to the wall by some five degrees to the left. Thus, the easel is rotated to the right by about 20 degrees from being parallel to the wall. Besides, the camera is as high above the ground as Juno's waist and tilted downward only very minimally.
The ground is a medium orange in the bottom left corner of the image. It gets a little darker and more purplish towards the opposite corner where it meets the wall.
Juno is on the left-hand side of the image. standing in front of the easel, a little left of its centre, and facing it. The image shows her to the left of the easel and from the rear right. Her head is tilted downward as if she was looking at the album cover. Her face is entirely on the far side of her head. The bottom of her hair is shifted to the back and to the left because she is actually in motion. Her right ear is still fully concealed under hair.
Her arms are relaxed on both sides. She is resting her weight on her right leg while having lifted up the heel of her left foot.
The right strap of her tank top is hovering above her right shoulder at a distance of a little more than the thickness of one of her fingers. The background appears through the gap.
The only light available in the image are the omnipresent medium grey ambient light and several white point lights on the ceiling beyond the edges of the image, only one of which is on this side of the wall. The sun is fixed straight above the scene, but the roof of the building which is outside the image is in its way. Since shadows are on in this picture, the roof keeps the sunlight out. Point light sources like those on the ceiling don't cast shadows, so they add to the ambient light, but they only illuminate avatars, objects and the like from one side. The highlights on her legs hint at the position of the sole point light on this side of the wall, namely behind and slightly to the left of Juno.
Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid #OSG17B #UnseenImageChallenge
OSgrid is probably the oldest 3-D virtual world based on free and open-source software (OpenSimulator) and run by community members. It's definitely the oldest 3-D virtual world that's federated with other virtual worlds.
These images are from OSgrid's 17th birthday celebration in July, 2024.
My little in-world sister @Juno Rowland, part-time OSgrid resident just like myself, celebrated the grid birthday with outfits based on the officially-issued women's tank tops. The first image shows her wearing one of these outfits on her pier at her now-soon-to-disappear home at Tropicana Tuneage on Friday, July 26th. She had been around the birthday sims on Thursday already, but in a different skirt. On Friday, she posed in one that's much easier for me to describe in front of a background that's a great deal easier to describe than the anniversary sims.
One day later, on Saturday, July 27th, she went and revisited the birthday exhibitions, also to see one of her favourite things, a Leonard Cohen album cover at an exhibition. The second image is from there.
Juno's look
- Body including head, eyelashes, feet and nails: Ruth2 v4 by the RuthAndRoth team ( @Austin Tate a.k.a. @Ai Austin, Ada Radius, Serie Sumei et al.)
- Shape: modified by herself from the shape in the Ruth2 v4 Extras box
- Skin: Starlight Remix Fair, NSFW, with eyebrows, but without eyeliner; originally by Eloh Eliot, "remixed" by yours truly so that Juno has a decent skin
- Hair: CS Milca by DieChaotin McMasters
- Necklace: Q's Pendant - OSgrid by Qandy Saw
- Top: Happy Bday OSG17B Black, mesh by Damien Fate, texture and assembly by Saphy Riler
- Skirt: mini-fuer-fate jeans beige, mesh and base texture by Klarabella Karamell, texture tinting and assembly by Juno herself
- Shoes: reBoot Flat Ballet Black, unrigged variants, by Taarna Welles
Image descriptions
The medium and the basic setup
Both images in this post are digital renderings from inside a 3-D virtual world, using shaders, simplified real-time reflections and an artificial sun as a directed light source for illuminating the scenery and casting shadows, but without ray-tracing. It shows a digital avatar made to look like a fairly young woman. In the first image, she is standing at the end of a wooden pier. In the second image, she is standing next to a painted portrait of Leonard Cohen which he has used as an album cover.
The locations
The images were created in two different places in OSgrid, known as sims. Both are linked to the 17th anniversary of OSgrid which was celebrated from July 22th to July 28th, 2024.
OSgrid is a virtual world, a so-called "grid", based on a virtual-world engine named OpenSimulator. OpenSimulator, OpenSim in short, is a free, open-source, server-side re-implementation of the technology of Second Life. It is not affiliated with Linden Lab, the creators and owners of Second Life.
Second Life is a centralised, commercial 3-D virtual world launched in 2003. It experienced a big hype starting in 2007 which faded away in 2008. It still exists, it is constantly evolving, and it is celebrating its 21st anniversary this month.
The development of OpenSim started in 2006, originally under the name of OpenSecondLife, then OpenSL, by reverse-engineering Second Life's viewer API and building a virtual world server against it. In early 2007, Linden Lab laid open the source code of the official Second Life viewer, the client application needed to access Second Life. This revealed large parts of Second Life's technology and made not only the development of third-party viewers possible, but also facilitatted OpenSim's development. It was also in early 2007 that the first test version of OpenSim came out.
Second Life, as well as the worlds based on OpenSimulator, are referred to as "grids" because they are split into square regions of 256 by 256 metres or roughly 280 by 280 yards. This roughly corresponds to a bit more than three by two major-league football pitches or soccer fields or a bit less than three by two American football fields.
While Second Life is a walled garden with only one publicly accessible grid that is connected to nothing else, OpenSimulator can be used by just about anyone to create and run their own grid. In 2008, a new feature called the Hypergrid was introduced that allows avatars registered on one grid to visit other grids. Thus, OpenSim is not only decentralised, but actually mostly federated. There are currently over 3,000 active grids, maybe over 4,000, and especially most of the larger public grids are connected to the Hypergrid.
Sims, in turn, are short for simulators which have to run in regions for any kind of content to be able to exist in them and for avatars to be able to enter them. In Second Life, one sim always covers one region. OpenSim has so-called varsims which can cover multiple regions arranged in a square without having borders between the regions. The upper limit imposed by the software is 32 by 32 or 1,024 regions, but anything significantly larger than 16 by 16 or 256 regions has been proven to be highly impractical.
OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid. It was launched in July, 2007, as a proving ground for OpenSim's own development which it still is. Nonetheless, it was the first OpenSim grid to surpass Second Life in land area, and it currently is one out of two grids to have done so. Also, as early as 2007 already, OSgrid referred to OpenSim in general and then, by 2008, to itself as "the Open Source Metaverse". It has used this term for an actual virtual world 14 years earlier than Mark Zuckerberg. For about just as long, the word "metaverse" has been part of the standard vocabulary in the OpenSim community.
The avatar in both pictures
The avatar shown in the image is Juno Rowland. She is, in fact, a backup avatar for my female alt, short for alternate avatar, that goes by the same name and looks the same while being at home on another grid.
Juno is built to look like a young woman. OpenSim does not explicitly support different ethnicities, but the basic avatar-building components available in OpenSim are almost exclusively geared towards avatars looking white or Latin American and in the 30s at most. She is 1.74 metres or 5 feet 8 1/2 inches tall which is taller than the average real-life Western woman by about the length of an adult person's palm. She is fairly slim which is somewhat concealed by the loose fit of her clothes.
Juno's skin textures are light to medium-light. Highlights and partly also shades are part of the skin textures, but very subdued. Most shading on her is created by the shader built into the viewer.
She has brown eyes and black hair worn as a rather short bob that narrows downward from where her ears are and extends to a height halfway between her chin and her shoulders. Her bangs cover her forehead entirely. Strands of her bangs partly cover her eyebrows, and two of them extend down as far as her upper eyelids. On each side, a single thick lock extends forward and slightly inward. These locks occasionally cover parts of her lower cheeks.
Juno is wearing a loose-fitting black tank top with the official logo of the 17th grid birthday festivities on it. The logo stretches across about 90% of Juno's chest and from slightly higher than right below her breasts to slightly higher than the middle of the front of the shirt.
In the top left corner of the birthday logo, there is the OSgrid logo. It consists of five identical parallelograms. Each one of them resembles a rectangle which, when placed horizontally, has its short edges tilted to the right by 18 degrees. The long edges are longer than the short edges by about three quarters. These five parallelograms are arranged around a common centre at the same distance and at angles of 72 degrees from each other. There is always one pointed angle slipping under the long side of a neighbouring parallelogram. This way, the gap in the middle between the parallelograms is a five-point star. The outer short edge of each parallelogram is farther away from the centre than the parallel long edge of the neighbouring parallelogram by a bit over half the latter's width. The top right parallelogram is placed exactly vertically.
The whole logo has a light, yellowish orange tint. Size-wise, it takes up a bit more than 20% of the width and about 70% of the height of the entire birthday logo.
To the right of the OSgrid logo, there is the name of the grid, "OSgrid", written in all capitals in the same tint of orange as the OSgrid logo. The writing is about two thirds as tall as each parallelogram in the OSgrid logo is long. It starts to the right of the vertical top right parallelogram at roughly 80% of its width, and the top of the letters is slightly higher than the obtuse top right corner of the top right parallelogram. The typeface used is a heavy variant of the Futura typeface, a geometric sans-serif typeface known for fairly small lower-case characters and a lower-case "a" which is like a "d" with a shorter line, much like in hand-writing.
Right below, "The Open Source Metaverse" is written at a vertical distance that is roughly the same as the general thickness of the letters in the "OSgrid" writing. All four words start with capitals. The writing lines up with the "OSgrid" writing to the left. The typeface is the same as the one used for the "OSgrid" writing, only smaller by about 60%. It is small enough to not be easily readable in the image at the resolution at which the image was posted. The writing is tinted a light grey, resembling aluminium.
Most of the lower half is taken up by a horizontal rectangle, tinted a darker, slightly less saturated, slightly more brownish tone of orange. To the left, it lines up with the bottom pointy-angled corner of the bottom left parallelogram in the logo. To the right, it lines up with the end of the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". At the top, it almost touches the vertical line of the "p" in the same writing.
On this rectangle, "17th Birthday" is written in the same black as the rest of the tank top and the same typeface as the other two writings, but twice the height as the writing "The Open Source Metaverse". Vertically, this writing is slightly above the middle of the rectangle. Horizontally, it lines up with the other two writings on the left.
Below the tank top, Juno is wearing a straight, loose-fitting miniskirt which ends roughly the length of one of her hands above her knees. Its texture gives it a look like washed-out denim in various shades of slightly yellowish, medium-light-to-medium brown. Seams, pockets and the fly are all only part of the texture. The pocket on the front to the left from Juno's point of view is completely covered by the tank top, the pocket on the other side is mostly covered. The texture does not emulate any rear pockets.
Apart from the skirt, Juno's legs are bare. On her feet, she is wearing a pair of flat ballet shoes which mostly show a black texture, slightly lighter than the tank top, with a structure that resembles an unidentified fabric. The insides of the shoes are a medium-light, shaded tone of brown, suggesting some fabric or thin leather again. The soles are a medium-light, slightly reddish brown. They have very low heels.
Around her neck, Juno is wearing a necklace consisting what appears to be a single wire of solid gold of a similar thickness as the material used for clothes hangers plus an OSgrid logo made of gold as well. The logo is a bit over half as big as the one on her tank top. The eye through which the wire runs is attached near one of the outer obtuse-angled corners, so the logo is rotated to the left in comparison with the one on the tank top. Both the wire and the logo are glossy, the logo more than the wire, but the material appearance is textured onto both.
In both Second Life and OpenSim-based worlds, unlike most other 3-D virtual worlds, avatars are not only highly configurable in-world, but also highly modular. Everything on Juno is an attachment. Her body is an attachment, the head included. Her feet are a separate attachment; different feet for medium and high heels are available. The skin textures can be replaced, and standard skins can be worn on this body. The eye texture can be replaced, too. Eyelashes, fingernails and toenails are attachments, although the latter are fully concealed inside her shoes. Her hair is an attachment. The top, the skirt, each shoe and the necklace are separate attachments which makes it possible for her to wear all kinds of outfits. Her shape is configurable with over 80 parameters, and even that can be replaced with another one which is usually just as configurable.
Everything that Juno is made up from was made by users. Everything else, including the purpose-made texture on the tank top, was made directly for OpenSim.
The scenery in the first image
The first image was created on a sim called Tropicana Tuneage, a multi-purpose sim which is regularly used for events, but which is also Juno's home in OSgrid.
The scenery is limited to a wooden pier which Juno is standing on. It takes up the lower 45% of the image. Its water-side end would line up with the lower side of Juno's butt if she was shown from behind. The top surface of the pier is textured in a way that suggests wooden planks that run transversally across the pier. The wood is very slightly less yellowish tone of brown than Juno's skirt and varies greatly between light-medium, almost light, and medium. The sides of the pier are outside the borders of the image.
The pier leads to the southwest. The camera angle follows it almost exactly in parallel. It is oriented farther to the right by about one degree. It is also roughly at the height of Juno's waist.
Beyond the pier and behind Juno, there is nothing but blue sea with gentle waves on it. The tone of blue has a fairly low saturation, and some of the waves are partly almost medium-dark grey. The horizon is at almost precisely two thirds of the height of the image, roughly below Juno's breasts, which shows that the camera is tilted downward by a few degrees.
The sky is a very pale, greenish blue with a very faint gradient towards the horizon that suggests haze. To Juno's right, there are some thin clouds which increasingly blend in with the sky, the lower they are. A bit of cloud is above her head as well. There are no clouds to her left.
Juno in the first image
Juno is slightly left of centre, standing on her right foot while moving her left foot forward and turning it to the left. She is about to turn herself around. Her arms are on her sides, the left arm is moved a bit forward. Her hands are relaxed with both middle fingers bent inward a little more than the other fingers.
Juno's face is expressionless. Any expressions would require specific animations to be played, mostly manually which would be an extra effort. She is looking past a point slightly above the camera.
Her hair is fully covering her ears. The lock on the left of her face, the right for the on-looker, is in front of the lower parts of her cheek. So is the lock on the other side, but less so.
Lighting in the first image
The simulated time of day is late afternoon. The sun is quite low already in the west. This can be told by the shadows which Juno's legs cast on the wooden planks texture on the pier as well as some narrow highlights on her neck, her arms and her legs. The sun itself is not in the image.
Apart from the sun, there is medium grey ambient light that shines the same from everywhere and therefore doesn't create any shadows.
Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.
The scenery in the second image
The second image was created in a different place on the same grid named OSG17B2. The name refers to OSgrid's 17th birthday, OSG17B in short. It is the second one of four numbered exhibition sims created for the birthday, two of which were opened to the public while the other two remain unused.
In the second image, Juno is inside a building used as a gallery of music album covers.
Most of the right-hand 60% of the image are taken up by an art easel. It is about one and two thirds times as high as Juno is tall while appearing smaller due to the perspective. It is rotated to the right from the camera being directly aimed at its front by about 25 degrees.
The easel is a fairly stable and elaborate construction which looks like it is adjustable for various canvas sizes. Below where the canvas would be put, there is a shelf for painting utensils. The easel is mostly white with no texture on it. The exceptions are eleven slotted screw heads and a handle roughly shaped like a six-point star with which the easel can be adjusted to different canvas sizes. They have metal-like, partly light grey, partly light yellowish or brownish textures with medium-light orange spots hinting at corrosion. These textures include highlights and shading. The parts themselves are not shiny. Of the screw heads, only five are unobscured. One is holding the adjustment handle in place. Three are holding the almost vertical part of the easel together, one close to the top, two near the bottom. The fifth one connects the right-hand rear support to the foot.
The easel is adjusted for something way bigger than what it is carrying. It's the cover of the album Recent Songs by the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. It was released in 1979 as his sixth studio album, and it is not known for high-charting single releases. The cover is about half as high as Juno is tall. Again, due to the perspective, it appears to be smaller. Its aspect ratio is very slightly warped, it is a little wider than it is high.
The album cover is based on a frontal facial portrait painting of Cohen by Dianne Lawrence. It shows him as a middle-aged, light-skinned man with green eyes and black, medium-short hair which he wears in a somewhat asymmetrical hairdo that is slightly fuller on his left, the on-looker's right, than on the other side. The top of his hair is cut off by the top edge of the canvas. At the bottom, the portrait ends at Cohen's shoulders. He is wearing a black shirt which lacks too many details to be identifiable any further.
The background behind him is a solid, slightly pale medium blue with a minimal hint of green.
Above his right shoulder, his left shoulder from the on-looker's point of view, there is a drawing of a hummingbird which is only black and background blue and about as long from beak to tail feathers as Cohen's mouth is wide. The bird seems to be hovering above his shoulder with no intention to touch down. Its beak is oriented to the right for the on-looker and tilted slightly downward to between Cohen's shoulder and the collar of his shirt.
Between the top left corner and Cohen's hair, his name is written, "Leonard Cohen". Likewise, between his hair and the top right corner, the title of the album is written, "Recent Songs". Both are in black, fairly small, in an unidentified, very heavy geometric sans-serif typeface and in all-caps.
The narrow right-hand side of the box that has the portrait on its front has a medium-dark wood texture, slightly reddish, slightly greyish, with the grain perpendicular to the long edges.
The wall behind the easel is mostly white with a black circular pattern on it. It consists of 39 concentric circles whose thickness increase from the outermost to the innermost circle. Instead of a 40th circle, there is a dot in the centre which is a little bigger than the thickness of the innermost circle. The texture itself is a bit over one and a half times as high as Juno is tall and twice as wide as it is high. Thus, it has ample of white space on both sides whereas the outermost 16 circles are more or less cut at the top and the bottom. Two of these patterns are within the border of the image above one another. The upper one is cut off by the upper edge of the image in such a way that only the two innermost circles are complete.
The wall makes up a bit less than the upper two thirds of the background of the image. Apart from Juno and the easel, everything below is ground. The edge between the wall and the floor shows that the camera is rotated from being perpendicular to the wall by some five degrees to the left. Thus, the easel is rotated to the right by about 20 degrees from being parallel to the wall. Besides, the camera is as high above the ground as Juno's waist and tilted downward only very minimally.
The ground is a medium orange in the bottom left corner of the image. It gets a little darker and more purplish towards the opposite corner where it meets the wall.
Juno in the second image
Juno is on the left-hand side of the image. standing in front of the easel, a little left of its centre, and facing it. The image shows her to the left of the easel and from the rear right. Her head is tilted downward as if she was looking at the album cover. Her face is entirely on the far side of her head. The bottom of her hair is shifted to the back and to the left because she is actually in motion. Her right ear is still fully concealed under hair.
Her arms are relaxed on both sides. She is resting her weight on her right leg while having lifted up the heel of her left foot.
The right strap of her tank top is hovering above her right shoulder at a distance of a little more than the thickness of one of her fingers. The background appears through the gap.
Lighting in the second image
The only light available in the image are the omnipresent medium grey ambient light and several white point lights on the ceiling beyond the edges of the image, only one of which is on this side of the wall. The sun is fixed straight above the scene, but the roof of the building which is outside the image is in its way. Since shadows are on in this picture, the roof keeps the sunlight out. Point light sources like those on the ceiling don't cast shadows, so they add to the ambient light, but they only illuminate avatars, objects and the like from one side. The highlights on her legs hint at the position of the sole point light on this side of the wall, namely behind and slightly to the left of Juno.
Save for being cropped, the image is unedited and unprocessed.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #ImageDescription #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid #OSG17B #UnseenImageChallenge
I wanted to participate in today's motto of the Unseen Image Challenge. But I wanted to do so with descriptions of actual images. And it made more sense to complete a set of descriptions that I had been working on since last year (yes, I know that other people take only a few seconds to fully describe an image) than to make an entirely new image.
However, even at the most limited extent, that would have meant one post, four images, twelve portraits, at least with no background whatsoever, with the same avatar in all twelve outfits, with a whole lot of similarities in the outfits and with always the exact same posture.
Nonetheless, I had to complete the preamble and improve it in parts. I had to write a detailed description of the custom shoe design in almost 2,000 characters. And I had to describe four variants of the same sports jacket and five variants of the same button-down shirt (I've done one jacket and three shirts now). It takes me longer to describe one button than it takes most people to describe an entire image. And I'm talking about portraits of a 3-D virtual world avatar.
In fact, I wanted to use this as a test balloon for which way of offering long image descriptions (not long as in 800 characters in the alt-text, but long as in well over 20,000 characters elsewhere) is better. I wanted to post the same images twice.
For one, I wanted to do as I always do and add a block with the long descriptions of three images and twelve portraits in the post itself, below all three images. The description block would start with a very long preamble that explains everything and describes what the images have in common, followed by individual descriptions of each image.
I know that this works technically, but it would inflate the post itself to way more than 40 times the size of a Mastodon toot, and it would put a whole lot of distance between each image and its individual description.
Besides, I wanted to make complete descriptions for each image as HTML documents, include each image plus alt-text in the respective HTML document, upload the HTML documents to the file space in my channel and put a link to each document underneath the corresponding image in the post.
This would have put the descriptions fairly close to the images, and it would have dramatically reduced the length of the post. But it would have been entirely untested. It may pretty well have blown up in my face. Besides, the descriptions wouldn't actually be where the images in the post are. And users of dedicated mobile apps wouldn't be able to read the image descriptions in their apps. Instead, tapping the description link would open the browser (provided what I plan to do works in the first place).
Well, I had to nix this for today because there's no way I can get it all done within the next bit over one hour.
Instead, I may use the two images of @Juno Rowland that were the last original images I posted, combine their alt-texts and long descriptions with fully black images and correct the image explanation where it's actually factually wrong. The post with these images in them is from last year. That's so long ago that I guess nobody remembers it anyway, so I hope this doesn't count as cheating.
I may actually post the "images" here on my Hubzilla channel instead of on the (streams) channel where I have originally posted them. Since there's nothing to actually see in the images, I don't have to be afraid of triggering anyone with eye contact.
As for my new portraits, they will go on (streams) because they will contain eye contact. But I can't say when this will be. There's still so much to do in the image descriptions.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #UnseenImageChallenge
However, even at the most limited extent, that would have meant one post, four images, twelve portraits, at least with no background whatsoever, with the same avatar in all twelve outfits, with a whole lot of similarities in the outfits and with always the exact same posture.
Nonetheless, I had to complete the preamble and improve it in parts. I had to write a detailed description of the custom shoe design in almost 2,000 characters. And I had to describe four variants of the same sports jacket and five variants of the same button-down shirt (I've done one jacket and three shirts now). It takes me longer to describe one button than it takes most people to describe an entire image. And I'm talking about portraits of a 3-D virtual world avatar.
In fact, I wanted to use this as a test balloon for which way of offering long image descriptions (not long as in 800 characters in the alt-text, but long as in well over 20,000 characters elsewhere) is better. I wanted to post the same images twice.
For one, I wanted to do as I always do and add a block with the long descriptions of three images and twelve portraits in the post itself, below all three images. The description block would start with a very long preamble that explains everything and describes what the images have in common, followed by individual descriptions of each image.
I know that this works technically, but it would inflate the post itself to way more than 40 times the size of a Mastodon toot, and it would put a whole lot of distance between each image and its individual description.
Besides, I wanted to make complete descriptions for each image as HTML documents, include each image plus alt-text in the respective HTML document, upload the HTML documents to the file space in my channel and put a link to each document underneath the corresponding image in the post.
This would have put the descriptions fairly close to the images, and it would have dramatically reduced the length of the post. But it would have been entirely untested. It may pretty well have blown up in my face. Besides, the descriptions wouldn't actually be where the images in the post are. And users of dedicated mobile apps wouldn't be able to read the image descriptions in their apps. Instead, tapping the description link would open the browser (provided what I plan to do works in the first place).
Well, I had to nix this for today because there's no way I can get it all done within the next bit over one hour.
Instead, I may use the two images of @Juno Rowland that were the last original images I posted, combine their alt-texts and long descriptions with fully black images and correct the image explanation where it's actually factually wrong. The post with these images in them is from last year. That's so long ago that I guess nobody remembers it anyway, so I hope this doesn't count as cheating.
I may actually post the "images" here on my Hubzilla channel instead of on the (streams) channel where I have originally posted them. Since there's nothing to actually see in the images, I don't have to be afraid of triggering anyone with eye contact.
As for my new portraits, they will go on (streams) because they will contain eye contact. But I can't say when this will be. There's still so much to do in the image descriptions.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #UnseenImageChallenge
@TheZeldaZone👑🏳️⚧️🎮🎀 On the one hand, that's the very reason why I give so many and so detailed explanations in the long image descriptions that I put directly into my posts in addition to alt-texts. (I can do that because my character limit is not 500 but 16,777,215.) My original images show extremely obscure niche content, and they aren't even real-life photos. That's why they need very extensive descriptions and explanations.
On the other hand, additional information must never be available exclusively in the alt-text. Not everyone can access alt-text. Reading alt-text requires working hands. Not everyone has working hands. Those who don't cannot read alt-text. Any and all information that's available only in the alt-text and neither in the post nor in the image is inaccessible and therefore permanently lost to these people.
If accessibility is for everyone, it must also be for those with physical disabilities that prevent them from reading alt-text.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
On the other hand, additional information must never be available exclusively in the alt-text. Not everyone can access alt-text. Reading alt-text requires working hands. Not everyone has working hands. Those who don't cannot read alt-text. Any and all information that's available only in the alt-text and neither in the post nor in the image is inaccessible and therefore permanently lost to these people.
If accessibility is for everyone, it must also be for those with physical disabilities that prevent them from reading alt-text.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@Frost 🐺❄️:therian: I didn't add tags to your post. If I were on Friendica, I could do that. But I'm not. I added them to my own comment.
And I've added those specific tags mostly for other people to be able to filter away my posts or comments or at least have them hidden behind automatically generated reader-side content warnings. That's a feature that has been available in the Fediverse since 2010 and on Mastodon since 2022. Hubzilla, where I am, has had it since its inception which was before Mastodon was created. I'm living Hubzilla's culture here.
I always tag anything I post that exceeds 500 characters even only by a smidge #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost so that those who don't want to see my "long" posts or comments have a choice not to see them. And trust me, there are lots of people on Mastodon who want the whole Fediverse to be a purist micro-blogging platform, and who want to rid themselves of any and all content that exceeds 500 characters. I give them a chance to do so.
When I talk about image descriptions in general, I always use the tags #ImageDescription, #ImageDescriptions, #ImageDescriptionMeta and #CWImageDescriptionMeta, and when I talk about alt-text in particular, I always use the tags #AltText, #AltTextMeta and #CWAltTextMeta.
For one, #AltText, #ImageDescription and #ImageDescriptions help people find my posts and comments on the topic. If you really think that the majority of Mastodon users will take a look at the whole thread and therefore your post, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Besides, #AltTextMeta, #CWAltTextMeta, #ImageDescriptionMeta and #CWImageDescriptionMeta make it possible for them to remove my "weird" and "crude" ideas on alt-text and image descriptions which are "weird" and "crude" because they deviate from Mastodon's "standards" so much that they may be potentially disturbing.
By using these hashtags, I hurt you.
By not using these hashtags, I probably hurt hundreds or thousands of Fediverse users who have filters for one or several of these hashtags to get rid of my posts and comments. Not using these hashtags does more damage overall than using them.
If you aren't okay with that, go block me on the spot.
And I've added those specific tags mostly for other people to be able to filter away my posts or comments or at least have them hidden behind automatically generated reader-side content warnings. That's a feature that has been available in the Fediverse since 2010 and on Mastodon since 2022. Hubzilla, where I am, has had it since its inception which was before Mastodon was created. I'm living Hubzilla's culture here.
I always tag anything I post that exceeds 500 characters even only by a smidge #Long, #LongPost, #CWLong and #CWLongPost so that those who don't want to see my "long" posts or comments have a choice not to see them. And trust me, there are lots of people on Mastodon who want the whole Fediverse to be a purist micro-blogging platform, and who want to rid themselves of any and all content that exceeds 500 characters. I give them a chance to do so.
When I talk about image descriptions in general, I always use the tags #ImageDescription, #ImageDescriptions, #ImageDescriptionMeta and #CWImageDescriptionMeta, and when I talk about alt-text in particular, I always use the tags #AltText, #AltTextMeta and #CWAltTextMeta.
For one, #AltText, #ImageDescription and #ImageDescriptions help people find my posts and comments on the topic. If you really think that the majority of Mastodon users will take a look at the whole thread and therefore your post, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Besides, #AltTextMeta, #CWAltTextMeta, #ImageDescriptionMeta and #CWImageDescriptionMeta make it possible for them to remove my "weird" and "crude" ideas on alt-text and image descriptions which are "weird" and "crude" because they deviate from Mastodon's "standards" so much that they may be potentially disturbing.
By using these hashtags, I hurt you.
By not using these hashtags, I probably hurt hundreds or thousands of Fediverse users who have filters for one or several of these hashtags to get rid of my posts and comments. Not using these hashtags does more damage overall than using them.
If you aren't okay with that, go block me on the spot.
@Frost 🐺❄️:therian:
How about people who don't even know what it is that they're looking at? Especially if they're curious about what it is?
I'm asking because my original images aren't even real-life photos. Rather, they are from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds, very obscure as in only one out of at least 200,000 Fediverse users even knows the underlying technology, much less specific places there. If I posted my images without sufficient explanation and description, next to nobody would have an idea what the images show.
Is there any hard, steadfast rule on what's relevant, and what isn't? One that applies to all images out there, no matter how obscure and niche and unusual the content?
Again, I post super-obscure content. Ask random people out of the blue what it looks like, and they won't know, regardless of whether they're sighted or not. They simply don't even know that it exists.
You can assume that everyone knows what a real-life cat looks like.
But, for example, I can't assume that everyone knows what my avatar looks like, also, but not only because my avatar can wear a whole assortment of different outfits.
At the same time, I can't assume that nobody wants to know what my avatar looks like. Or anything else in-world. Thus, I owe them a visual description. A sufficiently detailed one.
In fact, I can't just simply mention there being things in my images. I always have to expect there being blind or visually-impaired people asking, "Yeah, that's all fine, but what does it look like?" They legitimately don't know. I mean, how should they? In addition, they may ask, "And why do I even have to ask? Why don't you tell me right away what it looks like, you ableist swine?"
Trees are simple to describe. Buildings are a nightmare. And it gets even worse with objects that don't exist in real life. I couldn't possibly get away with mentioning that there's an OSW beacon standing somewhere. Would you know what it looks like? Especially since there appear to be at least five standard types of beacon, not mentioning modified beacons or even custom builds?
In fact, would you know what it is in the first place? What it does? What it's there for? What do you think, how many people would know? How many people would be completely satisfied if I only name-dropped it?
In fact, the same goes for the very location. Most people won't have the slightest idea what that place is of which they see a part in my pictures. But they may want to know. But if I just name-dropped Sulphur or BlackWhite Castle or UniCampus or Tropicana Tuneage or the OSgrid birthday sims, people would be about as smart as before because next to nobody has ever heard of any of these places before. (Be honest, have you?) And so I have to explain what they are and where they are.
For almost two years now, I've had to describe my original images twice. First of all, there's a long, detailed description in the post text body itself (as opposed to the alt-text); I've got a character limit of over 16.7 million (!), so I've got enough space. That description also includes all explanations necessary to understand the image and its content as well as verbatim transcripts of all pieces of text within the borders of the image. It regularly reaches five-digit character counts, and it may take me multiple entire days to research for and write it.
There is a whole lot of reasons why this description has to be so long.
In addition, I always distill a shorter description with no explanations for the alt-text from the long description. It usually doesn't contain any text transcripts either because there simply is no room for them. Nonetheless, it normally grows about 900 characters long. I need the other 600 characters to announce the long descriptions in the post itself so that people on Mastodon prior to 4.3 find them.
In case you say that this is way overkill: Before I've (content warning: long post, eye contact, alcohol) started writing highly detailed image descriptions, my virtual world image posts looked like (content warning: eye contact, alcohol) this or (content warning: long post, eye contact, alcohol) this or (content warning: eye contact) this. Apart from the missing full stops (and the missing content warnings), would you honestly and sincerely say the descriptions in the alt-texts are fully sufficient for everyone out there? Or would you say that even they are still too long?
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Image descriptions are cool and good! Please write them, if you can! Not just for blind people; they're also super helpful for if the image doesn't load (we personally have this when we're out of mobile data and limited to nigh-unusably-slow internet) and for people staring at the image going "...what am I supposed to be looking at here, what's important in this?" (also me).
How about people who don't even know what it is that they're looking at? Especially if they're curious about what it is?
I'm asking because my original images aren't even real-life photos. Rather, they are from very obscure 3-D virtual worlds, very obscure as in only one out of at least 200,000 Fediverse users even knows the underlying technology, much less specific places there. If I posted my images without sufficient explanation and description, next to nobody would have an idea what the images show.
Don't stress about having a Bad Description, and don't stress about Describing Literally Everything – less is actually /better./ Something simple like "my kitty in a basket, looking cute" is a perfect description, and way better than describing every last irrelevant detail. The irrelevant details actually make it harder to read.
Is there any hard, steadfast rule on what's relevant, and what isn't? One that applies to all images out there, no matter how obscure and niche and unusual the content?
Again, I post super-obscure content. Ask random people out of the blue what it looks like, and they won't know, regardless of whether they're sighted or not. They simply don't even know that it exists.
You can assume that everyone knows what a real-life cat looks like.
But, for example, I can't assume that everyone knows what my avatar looks like, also, but not only because my avatar can wear a whole assortment of different outfits.
At the same time, I can't assume that nobody wants to know what my avatar looks like. Or anything else in-world. Thus, I owe them a visual description. A sufficiently detailed one.
In fact, I can't just simply mention there being things in my images. I always have to expect there being blind or visually-impaired people asking, "Yeah, that's all fine, but what does it look like?" They legitimately don't know. I mean, how should they? In addition, they may ask, "And why do I even have to ask? Why don't you tell me right away what it looks like, you ableist swine?"
Trees are simple to describe. Buildings are a nightmare. And it gets even worse with objects that don't exist in real life. I couldn't possibly get away with mentioning that there's an OSW beacon standing somewhere. Would you know what it looks like? Especially since there appear to be at least five standard types of beacon, not mentioning modified beacons or even custom builds?
In fact, would you know what it is in the first place? What it does? What it's there for? What do you think, how many people would know? How many people would be completely satisfied if I only name-dropped it?
In fact, the same goes for the very location. Most people won't have the slightest idea what that place is of which they see a part in my pictures. But they may want to know. But if I just name-dropped Sulphur or BlackWhite Castle or UniCampus or Tropicana Tuneage or the OSgrid birthday sims, people would be about as smart as before because next to nobody has ever heard of any of these places before. (Be honest, have you?) And so I have to explain what they are and where they are.
For almost two years now, I've had to describe my original images twice. First of all, there's a long, detailed description in the post text body itself (as opposed to the alt-text); I've got a character limit of over 16.7 million (!), so I've got enough space. That description also includes all explanations necessary to understand the image and its content as well as verbatim transcripts of all pieces of text within the borders of the image. It regularly reaches five-digit character counts, and it may take me multiple entire days to research for and write it.
There is a whole lot of reasons why this description has to be so long.
In addition, I always distill a shorter description with no explanations for the alt-text from the long description. It usually doesn't contain any text transcripts either because there simply is no room for them. Nonetheless, it normally grows about 900 characters long. I need the other 600 characters to announce the long descriptions in the post itself so that people on Mastodon prior to 4.3 find them.
In case you say that this is way overkill: Before I've (content warning: long post, eye contact, alcohol) started writing highly detailed image descriptions, my virtual world image posts looked like (content warning: eye contact, alcohol) this or (content warning: long post, eye contact, alcohol) this or (content warning: eye contact) this. Apart from the missing full stops (and the missing content warnings), would you honestly and sincerely say the descriptions in the alt-texts are fully sufficient for everyone out there? Or would you say that even they are still too long?
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@-0--1- @David G. Smith If anything, the AI to describe the image should be chooseable, and the available AIs should be configurable at least for the admin. And especially, AI image description must not be mandatory and hard-coded. There must always be a way to describe an image manually, no matter how many people swear that AI is better at describing any image out there than any human.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta #AI #AIVsHuman #HumanVsAI
@-0--1- @David G. Smith Still, first of all, if I posted an image without an alt-text (which I'd never do), AltBot would have to assume full admin rights over the Hubzilla channel that I'm currently commenting from because that's the only way for another Fediverse actor to alter the source code of my posts.
Altering the source code of the post is necessary because Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte neither have a dedicated alt-text field, nor are images file attachments there. Rather, images are embedded directly into the post, in-line, just the same way blogs handle images. And alt-text has to be woven into the image-embedding code in the post. Thus, the post itself has to be altered.
So, assuming AltBot actually manages to circumvent the two most advanced permissions systems in the Fediverse, it would have to trace back an image that it perceives as a file attachment to where exactly the embedding code for that particular image is in the post.
It would have to be able to both understand and write the specific flavour of BBcode used by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.
It would have to, for example, take this piece of code...
Not to mention that AltBot would require extensive detail niche knowledge about the topic covered by the image to be able to whip up the above alt-text in the first place. (By the way: The alt-text example is genuine. I've actually used it. And it's an extremely whittled-down version of the long image description of the same image in the post itself, a description which has to be the longest in the entire Fediverse.)
Ideally, AltBot would do so without flagging the post as edited.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Altering the source code of the post is necessary because Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte neither have a dedicated alt-text field, nor are images file attachments there. Rather, images are embedded directly into the post, in-line, just the same way blogs handle images. And alt-text has to be woven into the image-embedding code in the post. Thus, the post itself has to be altered.
So, assuming AltBot actually manages to circumvent the two most advanced permissions systems in the Fediverse, it would have to trace back an image that it perceives as a file attachment to where exactly the embedding code for that particular image is in the post.
It would have to be able to both understand and write the specific flavour of BBcode used by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.
It would have to, for example, take this piece of code...
[zrl=https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295][zmg=800x533]https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photo/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295-2.jpg[/zmg][/zrl][zrl=https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photos/jupiter_rowland/image/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295][zmg=https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/photo/b1e7bf9c-07d8-45b6-90bb-f43e27199295-2.jpg]Digital shaded rendering of the main building of the Universal Campus, a downloadable island location for 3-D virtual worlds based on OpenSimulator. The camera position is about three metres or ten feet above the ground. The camera is tilted slightly upward and rotated slightly to the left from the building's longitudinal axis. The futuristic building is over 200 metres long, stretching far into the distance, and its front is about 50 metres wide. Its structure is mostly textured to resemble brushed stainless steel, and almost everything in-between is grey tinted glass. The main entrance of the building in the middle of the front has two pairs of glass doors. They are surrounded by a massive complex geometrical structure, very roughly reminiscent of a vintage video game spacecraft with the front facing upward. Four huge cylindrical pillars carry the roof end, the outer two of which extend beyond it. All are tilted away from the landing area in front of the building and at the same time outward to the sides. The sides of the building are slightly tilted themselves. In the distance, a large geodesic dome rises from the building. There is a large circular area in front of the main entrance as well as several wide paths. They have light concrete textures, and they are lined with low walls with almost white concrete textures. Furthermore, various shrubs and trees decorate the scenery.[/zmg][/zrl]Not to mention that AltBot would require extensive detail niche knowledge about the topic covered by the image to be able to whip up the above alt-text in the first place. (By the way: The alt-text example is genuine. I've actually used it. And it's an extremely whittled-down version of the long image description of the same image in the post itself, a description which has to be the longest in the entire Fediverse.)
Ideally, AltBot would do so without flagging the post as edited.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@-0--1- By the way, I'll accept that AltBot is
when it's better at describing and explaining images about extremely obscure niche topics accurately than experts on these topics with years of experience.
I've yet to encounter an AI that outdoes my own image-describing in accuracy and level of detail. This, by the way, is likely to require knowledge that only I have.
CC: @David G. Smith
#AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
AMAZINGLY GOOD
when it's better at describing and explaining images about extremely obscure niche topics accurately than experts on these topics with years of experience.
I've yet to encounter an AI that outdoes my own image-describing in accuracy and level of detail. This, by the way, is likely to require knowledge that only I have.
CC: @David G. Smith
#AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@Chris Mills @:neuro: Pixy's Journey :v_bi: Kind of similar here, only that the extra information always goes into the post text itself. That extra information is necessary because I only ever post about extremely obscure topics, and I want people to understand my image posts without having to look anything up themselves.
Whenever I post a wholly original image, I even add two image descriptions, a "short" and purely visual one in the alt-text and an extensive one that includes explanations in the post itself.
And yes, I write my image descriptions myself by hand. I'm on a desktop computer with a hardware keyboard most of the time. Besides, AI can't nearly do what I do.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Whenever I post a wholly original image, I even add two image descriptions, a "short" and purely visual one in the alt-text and an extensive one that includes explanations in the post itself.
And yes, I write my image descriptions myself by hand. I'm on a desktop computer with a hardware keyboard most of the time. Besides, AI can't nearly do what I do.
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@Arik One of the reasons why I describe each one of my original images twice.
I always have a long image description (as in you wouldn't believe that it's possible to post that many characters anywhere in the Fediverse) in the post itself (as in not in the alt-text). That long description always includes all explanations necessary for complete laypeople who didn't even know the topic of my image posts exists until they came across that particular post to understand the post and the image(s).
For example, I regularly need well over 1,000 characters alone to tell people where a picture was taken. Or I might have an object in an image that doesn't exist in real life, and I end up describing what it looks like in some 3,000 characters and then explaining what it is, what it does and what it is there for in another 2,500 characters. (Am I supposed to just drop its name and expect people to try and fail Googling it?)
I still add an alt-text to each one of my images in addition. But I don't explain anything in the alt-text. Especially, I never explain anything only in the alt-text.
For one, not everyone can access alt-text. Some people have physical disabilities that make it impossible for them to access alt-text. Thus, any information not available in the image, not available in the post text, only available in the alt-text is inaccessible and therefore lost to them. But I want them to understand my posts as well.
Besides, there isn't enough room for explanations in the alt-text anyway. In theory, I don't have a character limit for alt-texts just like I don't have a character limit for posts. In practice, however, Mastodon chops off longer alt-texts from outside Mastodon at the 1,500-character mark. And so I only have 1,500 characters for alt-texts, and I need a few hundred already to explain that there is also a long image description and where it is.
CC: @Christine Malec @Stevan @Patrick Hadfield @GunChleoc @Doug Bostrom
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
I always have a long image description (as in you wouldn't believe that it's possible to post that many characters anywhere in the Fediverse) in the post itself (as in not in the alt-text). That long description always includes all explanations necessary for complete laypeople who didn't even know the topic of my image posts exists until they came across that particular post to understand the post and the image(s).
For example, I regularly need well over 1,000 characters alone to tell people where a picture was taken. Or I might have an object in an image that doesn't exist in real life, and I end up describing what it looks like in some 3,000 characters and then explaining what it is, what it does and what it is there for in another 2,500 characters. (Am I supposed to just drop its name and expect people to try and fail Googling it?)
I still add an alt-text to each one of my images in addition. But I don't explain anything in the alt-text. Especially, I never explain anything only in the alt-text.
For one, not everyone can access alt-text. Some people have physical disabilities that make it impossible for them to access alt-text. Thus, any information not available in the image, not available in the post text, only available in the alt-text is inaccessible and therefore lost to them. But I want them to understand my posts as well.
Besides, there isn't enough room for explanations in the alt-text anyway. In theory, I don't have a character limit for alt-texts just like I don't have a character limit for posts. In practice, however, Mastodon chops off longer alt-texts from outside Mastodon at the 1,500-character mark. And so I only have 1,500 characters for alt-texts, and I need a few hundred already to explain that there is also a long image description and where it is.
CC: @Christine Malec @Stevan @Patrick Hadfield @GunChleoc @Doug Bostrom
#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #AltText #AltTextMeta #CWAltTextMeta #ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
@🇨🇦 OhOkKay
Mind if I take a few days instead to describe one image and do some research for the description? My original images need an extremely high level of description detail.
#ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Be kind, take a few extra seconds to share your image with everyone.
Mind if I take a few days instead to describe one image and do some research for the description? My original images need an extremely high level of description detail.
#ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #ImageDescriptionMeta #CWImageDescriptionMeta
Is alt text useful? Should you describe colors in images? Find answers to these questions, and more, with these polls and insights.
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/polls-about-alt-text-on-social-media/
@commissionerHR
Thanks for adding the #ImageDescription, I gladly boost your post. :)
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