I'm trying to consistently put alt text on my blog. I don't. I genuinely don't. Prior to like, a month ago, I think, my blog just didn't have alt text. Part of what got me realising that, like I had literally no idea I was doing that, was using mastodon regularly on kind.social and posting on cohost. But I was only doing that because I had an image I wanted to post every day in the form of my custom magic posts, and those I could determine an alt text for them very easily.
So that habit got built a little at a time and a lot of the alt text I use now is stuff like 'an icon of a thing.'
but also understand with that habit came a lot of discouragement. The way people talk about alt text on mastodon makes me not post pictures there aside from the once-a-day custom magic card. The kind of people who get very mad about alt text and accessibility features enough to yell at me, a stranger, about it, are the kind of people I read once, then mute because I can't address structural concerns while they yell at me about them and all I can do is my best. Haranguing strangers doesn't help me build the habit.
Like if the only way to do alt text would be to go back through my blog of ten years and have to alt text everything as the first thing I did, it'd never happen. It just wouldn't! There's an enormous archive that doesn't necessarily load reliably, it's a huge pain in the ass and probably a full time job's worth of work for some time to go do that, and with no practice at alt text, it'd probably look bad and be unhelpful.
I want to build better habits, I want to do a better job of the things I do.
You build good habits a day at a time but part of that means that there's got to be a version of the habit you can do every day.
