I am frequently on Piefed (Lemmy) and occasionally on Mastodon and I noticed they use ALT tags for images way more on Mastodon than we do here.

Anyone know why this is? it is more about the software or the culture or maybe just historical?

It seems like a good idea to always set the ALT tag for an image post on both services, and I’ve seen many ppl on the other site say they won’t boost (share) any image posts without ALT tags (since vision-impaired people really benefit from them).

Just curious…

  • CombatWombat@feddit.onlineEnglish
    44·
    2 days ago

    Mostly cultural. There’s a fair number of masto users who will not boost posts without alt text, and will say so in your mentions. Also the admin from the New Jersey instance runs a scoreboard for the instance that uses alt text most consistently that a fair number of people take seriously.

    edit: I think the cultural difference arose out of who the early adopters were – a lot of early mastodon users were indie web folks who were interested in the w3c, and think a lot about accessibility on the web, whereas a lot of early threadiverse adopters were reddit refugees where it wasn’t something people thought about as much.