@fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@dlakelan @RachelThornSub But what are the odds that five thousand blind people will encounter the image, and all care about it enough to generate the alt text? For a lot of images posted by a lot of people, it will be encountered by zero blind people, so zero compute energy will be used.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@tomayac They change pretty often. I could give prompt advice and that might be more helpful than sharing the actual prompt.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@quanin 🤮 ⚰️

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@quanin Isn't that what the poop emoji is for?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@tewha 🙄

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@tewha So what you're saying is there's at least a couple guys in the group message waiting hopefully for the day when someone, somewhere, mentions an octopus. They'll finally get to use that one!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

I must be old. I really don't understand emoji reactions. If I say "I'm on the bus and will be there in half an hour" to the group message, why do five people need to react with the bus emoji? A thumbs up or a heart or a smile I get. It communicates some sort of information. You like it, or you're happy, or whatever. But all reacting "bus" communicates is that...the word bus was in the original message, and you recognized it! Yes! Good for you! You recognized the word bus! Do you want a cookie or something?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@tewha @RachelThornSub The other issue is that when you read the AI description, it can often change your own perception of the image. People are really good at thinking they see what something authoritative-sounding tells them is there.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@sinmisterios @the5thColumnist @RachelThornSub Another thing you could do is just copy paste an explanation of your issue into the alt text. Odds are someone else will write it for you. Or a blind person who comes across the image will ask. Accessibility for people with disabilities shouldn't mean silencing the voices of other people with disabilities. You could also create an image-only account, that says write in the profile you can't write alt-text. That way people who don't ever want to have images we can't understand in our timelines could follow your main account, and ignore your image only account.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@pvd1313 @the5thColumnist @RachelThornSub TalkBack is what fully blind folks use, and it works well. But it needs training from a specialist; nobody can just learn it completely by themselves. However, dictation on the Nokias should work for making calls and answering messages. I really don't know how accessible telegram is with dictation or TalkBack these days, though. Unfortunately I use IOS, not Android. @dhamlinmusic do you know anything?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@pvd1313 @the5thColumnist @RachelThornSub What kind of phone does she have?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@b Yes, the blind community is quite strong, and almost all of us moved over from Twitter when they discontinued the API and broke accessibility. It wasn't like in sighted communities where some percent is on Mastodon, and some is on Twitter. Nearly a hundred percent of the blindness community who was active on twitter was forced to move.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@pvd1313 @the5thColumnist @RachelThornSub Depends. I like to start with deepseek-ocr if I have any reason to suspect the image is text. If it is, I can stop there. Otherwise, I move up to something like microsoft/phi-4-multimodal-instruct. If I still care and didn't get enough, llama-3.2-90b-vision-instruct will do the trick for most things. Only if it's charts and graphs that I care about do I need to use either the Google or OpenAI models. If it's pornographic, I have to use Grok, because XAI is completely and utterly unhinged and won't refuse anything no matter what. I use everything either locally where possible, or via the openrouter.ai API. That way it's more private, and I'm only paying for what I use. I usually use the tool: github.com/SigmaNight/basiliskLLM

It supports ollama, openrouter, and any openAI compatible endpoint, and integrates perfectly with the NVDA screen reader.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@pvd1313 @the5thColumnist @RachelThornSub This helps a lot, yes. Though if I know you just AI generated it, I'm probably not even going to keep reading. My AI is almost certainly better than yours, because I use it constantly and have customized the settings to get it to be as accurate as these things are capable of being.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@the5thColumnist @RachelThornSub My suggestion would be to keep it simple. If the reason you posted the photo was because it was a pretty flower, well...that's fine for the alt-text. No matter how many words you use, you might not be able to communicate the exact feeling of beauty you experienced. If you could, you'd be a writer, not a photographer. Ask yourself why you posted, and what you want someone to take away from it. If you want them to notice the colour, or the size, or whatever, those are what goes in the alt text.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@RachelThornSub @milkman76 And this is an entirely false argument. An AI specialized in describing images can run on a consumer PC, these days. It's doing zero of the things you're talking about. Apple has done image descriptions locally on its phones for five years now. If you're just tossing images at Chat GPT, you're doing it wrong. The same way as if you gave chat GPT a CSV file and told it to sort it for you. There are way, way better ways of doing that, that get you the result you want quicker, without the resource waste.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@RachelThornSub So as an actual blind user who uses AI regularly...no, not really. If you include AI generated alt-text, the odds are you're not checking it for accuracy. But I might not know that, so I assume the alt-text is more accurate than it is. If you don't use any alt-text at all, I'll use my own AI tools built-in to my screen reader to generate it myself if I care, and I know exactly how accurate or trustworthy those tools may or may not be. This has a few advantages:
1. I'm not just shoving images into Chat GPT or some other enormous LLM. I tend to start with deepseek-ocr, a 3b (3 billion parameter) model. If that turns out not to be useful because the image isn't text, I move up to one of the 90b llama models. For comparison, chat GPT and Google's LLM's are all 3 trillion parameters or larger. A model specializing in describing images can run on a single video card in a consumer PC. There is no reason to use a giant data center for this task.
2. The AI alt text is only generated if a blind person encounters your image, and cares enough about it to bother. If you're generating AI alt text yourself, and not bothering to check or edit it at all, you're just wasting resources on something that nobody may even read.
3. I have prompts that I've fiddled with over time to get me the most accurate AI descriptions these things can generate. If you're just throwing images at chat GPT, what it's writing is probably not accurate anyway.

If you as a creator are providing alt text, you're making the implicit promise that it's accurate, and that it attempts to communicate what you meant by posting the image. If you cannot, or don't want to, make that promise to your blind readers, don't bother just using AI. We can use AI ourselves, thanks. Though it's worth noting that if you're an artist and don't want your image tossed into the AI machine by a blind reader, you'd better be providing alt text. Because if you didn't, and I need or want to understand the image, into the AI it goes.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@cachondo @FreakyFwoof It's not a matter of affording, for me. If it wasn't for NVDA I'd have to come up with the money for jaws. So I give that money to NVDA instead. I just never stopped setting money aside for a screen reader.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@FreakyFwoof TYup. The anual jaws price increase is just a reminder for me to up my NVDA donation.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

2mo

@munin Dismissing your lived experience is not my intent. But it's not something I can speak to as it's not an experience I've had, 'nor can imagine. And if we're trying to define what it means to be intelligent, we kind of do need to base it on things the majority of people can understand.