accessiblity is cool! ~ savy

I used to shitpost a lot on my Instagram account. I barely posted on there, only reshared reels or randoms stories about my thoughts and stuff that too to close friends. I’ve been told this a lot that my stories on there didn’t make any sense and need additional context, to which i answer, yes, cause the people who they are meant for, understand the context, and those people is me :) . But after ~Meta~ Facebook made changes to their moderation policy, I decided to stop using it, at last. I wanted to get off that platform for quite some time at that point. Reels have eaten away soo much time from my life. I could’ve completed so many side-projects, maybe even taken more “jobs” from friends, learned something new, studied so that i would have a better GPA 😭. But yea, I booted that app from my phone, but the account still lives, cause I still have some people that i can only exclusively contact thru the ‘gram. I use Beeper to keep track of those DMs. It’s a really good app.

Anywho i needed some other place to shitpost on. Can’t post of ~X~ Twitter cause i want to reduce my dependence on that propaganda machine. The only other option that i could think of was bluesky. I’m gonna say it first and foremost. I love Bluesky. The App, Service and the dev SDK. It’s literally the best. It’s what you except it to be, ~X~ Twitter but without all the bad bits. When i posted on Instagram, I never added added alt-text to my images. It’s because it tucked in behind an additional click in the “Additional Settings” menu. To be fair, Instagram automatically adds auto-generated alt-text but it’s not sufficient most of the time. On Bluesky, when you add a media, there is a big (well prominent if not big) button to add alt-text for the media. You are end up adding it cause it’s just so in your face, not in a bad way tho.

I’m not gonna lie, I never really cared about Alt-Text until one of my friends reposted this infographics on the butterfly app.

An infographic. There are six panels.
1. Slow internet. Alt text is shown in place of unloaded images. a drawing shows a phone with poor signal, and alt text is visible where the image should have loaded.
2. Findabillity. Alt text helps to search content. A drawing shows someone searching 'dog with banana' and a post is shown underneath without the words 'dog' or 'banana'. It is implied to be part of the alt text.
3. Screen readers. Alt is read out to people using text-to-speech software. There is a drawing of the output a screen-reader would show when viewing an image with alt text on bluesky.
4. Translation. Alt text can be translated. A drawing shows a post being translated. The alt text is also translated into german.
5. Readability. Text in images can be made legible There is a drawing of some truly awful handwriting inside a speech bubble. The alt text clarifies what the text is supposed to say.
6. Disambiguation. Description helps clarify intent. There is a drawing of a post with a picture of a creature. This is styled after the famous optical illusion of a rabbit and a duck. The alt text clarifies that the animal is a rabbit. It definitely looks more like a duck. — Infographic by @dremenec.com on Bluesky

And as i have been posting a lot on bluesky for these past two weeks, i have become more conscious of adding alt-text to my posts. Just the process of thinking about describing and typing the alt-text itself makes you more connected to the thing that you sharing 😭. I know it sounds wierd but it is what it is. I’m visually impaired myself, my prescription glasses are +6.75 and +7.25, but i wear eye-glasses so alt-text aren’t much of a “requirement” for me and i’ve largely ignored then for most of my life, but that infographic and posting on bluesky alone, made me realize how important it is making your content accessible to everyone.

I’ve tried to keep the HTML on this website semantic enough according to all the knowledge that i have of semantic HTML tags so far, But from now on, I’ll try to maintain even more care in to keeping the structure of this site semantic. I’ve added actual descriptive alt-text, to the images on my previous blogs so that might mess the RSS for the blog 😭. Sorry about that 🙇. For the emojis i already use a remark plugin to add accessibility tags to the emoji, so that is fine. I still need to add a11y tags to some tags on the page which Lighthouse suggests, I’ll get around to doing that soon™️ . :D

Update

I ended up removing the content field from the rss feed for now cause it’s an headache to maintain atm.