Text descriptions for images, videos and audio are expected on the Fediverse, it’s really important to be considerate of blind, deaf and deafblind people who use adaptive technology to browse the internet. Adding text descriptions to your media attachments makes it much easier for the adaptive tech to work.
By the time you’ve been adding descriptions for a while it becomes second nature, but if you’re not used to adding text descriptions it can be easy to forget to add them. However, help is available!
There is a bot called PleaseCaption which will automatically send you a DM if you’ve forgotten to include an alt text on an image, video or audio post:
- Follow the PleaseCaption bot at @PleaseCaptionBot@hachyderm.io
- PleaseCaption will automatically follow you back (if you have follow requests switched on confirm the bot’s request to activate the reminders)
- If you post an image, video or audio without a description, PleaseCaption will send you a DM about it as a reminder. You can then edit the post to add the description in if you like.
What’s the point of a reminder? How do I add the description after it’s published?
Mastodon and many other Fedi platforms support post editing, so you can add a description into your post after you’ve published it.
How do I stop the reminders from PleaseCaption?
To stop the reminders:
- Unfollow PleaseCaption
- Block and then unblock PleaseCaption, this will remove if as a follower but you will still be able to follow it again in future
How do I delete the reminder DMs from PleaseCaption?
Just favourite a reminder and PleaseCaption will automatically delete it.
Does it check if posts I boost have descriptions?
No, not any more. It used to, but ran into technical difficulties with this feature so the developers have switched boost-checking off for the moment.