More Mastodon - about vision.

Keeping Mastodon friendly for others

There are many vision-impaired people on Mastodon / the Fediverse. Just like in the real world out there. For those, there are special screenreaders that read out the posts and toots, which is great.

For that reason, Mastodon instances offer the option to add text to images, and  everyone's encouraged to do so.

If a screenreader only says "image" or not even that when going over your post, that takes away a lot of the fun of reading your posts or even the benefit of following you. So please, be kind to your vision-impaired fellows on Mastodon and add a bit of descriptive text to your images. The Optical Character Recognition, which detects text from the image, is a great help. (Note that it's a help, not a perfect tool. Don't rely on it, always check.)

Next, there are hashtags. As I already wrote, it's best to put your hashtags at the bottom of a toot. Imagine you have to hashtag listen to a toot about hashtag baseball and the best hashtag player of the hashtag NFL, then you will be hashtag bored very soon. Right?

So please, put hashtag hashtags at the hashtag bottom of each toot.

Also: don't overdo the hashtags. Two, three, four at most should be enough.

When you're listening to a toot and you have to sit through a list of five or more (I've seen posts with twenty!) hashtags, that's quite off-putting too.

And no, I'm not visually impaired (although colour blindness seems to be categorised as such). I just try to assist people in making Mastodon a great experience for everyone.