mrhands

Sexy game(s) maker

  • he/him

I do UI programming for AAA games and I have opinions about adult games


Discord
mrhands31

lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i feel a wisp of a thing happening that's like

  • accessibility is good
  • the internet is only accessible if every single person on it puts some extra effort into stuff they post
  • therefore, anyone who doesn't do that... is bad

which feels similar to what happened to "problematic", i guess? where it shifted from "hey don't absorb every facet of this corporate media completely uncritically", to like, a thing that's said about human beings. not even public figures, just, someone who draws art who you don't like

i feel like leftist communities have a real problem with turning every form of "this would be nice" into a yardstick of moral worth. and it turns out yardsticks are great for swatting people with


meanwhile i don't know if anyone really has any idea what they're doing here anyway. i don't know what it's like to be blind. i don't think i know anyone who's blind. i think out of 30k twitter followers i had two i knew to... have very poor vision, i guess, but i'm not even sure about specifics, and now i don't remember who they were.

i think alt text is good and i have been thinking about alt text since before some of you were even allowed online, but i still don't even know what good alt text is. is it helpful to have a screenreader say "drawing of a fox" to you? does that convey anything? would you feel fulfilled if i DMed you to say "hey i drew a fox" and that was all, and i didn't show you the picture? would you look down on me if i decided not to give you that experience?

i try to imagine myself in the position of experiencing images only through audio descriptions, and my main inkling is that unless the alt text is some breathtaking prose (or the image is a comic with a joke that's funny on its own or something), it might as well say "art you can't see". like surely i might as well just skip to the next post.


sometimes i think about how people on twitter liked to have a good time 𝕥𝕪𝕡𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕚𝕟 𝕕𝕠𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕖-𝕤𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕔𝕜 𝕠𝕣 𝕨𝕙𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣, until there was a big uprising about it, because screenreaders can't handle it. allegedly they read out the entire unicode name of each character in a row, and these are all named a mouthful like "mathematical double-struck small t".

but that's fucking ridiculous. even if you used these characters as intended, in math, the result would be horrendous. consider:

𝑓(𝑥) = 𝑎𝑥² + 𝑏𝑥 + 𝑐

my understanding is that this would be read as — are you ready? —

mathematical italic small f open parenthesis mathematical italic small x close parenthesis equals mathematical italic small a mathematical italic small x superscript two plus mathematical italic small b mathematical italic small x plus mathematical italic small c

how is that useful?

but there was never any uprising against the developers of screenreader software — which is largely a paid product — to just make this fucking work. instead the clear demand was for everyone — everyone — everyoneeveryone — the entire human race to:

  1. understand the insane and unpredictable quirks of screenreader software, which they have never and most likely will never use themselves, and also could not use the way most of its actual userbase does without considerable practice

  2. work around those quirks every time they post anything publicly online, and thus

  3. not do funny things with unicode

  4. or they are bad people

"screenreader software" is deployed the same way "the bogeyman" is to children. i don't even know what "screenreader software" means. aren't there two major such things for windows? jaws and, idk, the other one? presumably mac has something totally different, and i know there's at least one open source one for linux. do they all have the same quirks? can people switch? i don't know. does anyone know? it feels like i'm being told secret video game tricks on the playground, but for video games that i don't own and neither does the other kid. hardly anyone involved in the conversation has direct experience but somehow it turns into lectures.

this isn't reasonable. this isn't sustainable. i don't know what is.


sometimes i also think about the time i went to japan for two weeks. my japanese is extremely limited, but as a way of forcing myself to keep it in cache while i was there, i tweeted only in japanese while i was there.

by which i mean

毎ツイートが日本語にだけ書いた

and some guy complained because he couldn't read my tweets.

but not everything is for everyone. not everything can be for everyone. writing "photo of my cat" doesn't mean they can suddenly see the photo of my cat.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

screen readers are something else tbh. a friend was asking what full-width characters (This) sounds like in a screen reader, and i was curious myself

so I proceeded to struggle with finding a screen reader on my linux system and eventually settled on just using my phone, which has a built-in screen reader

and it at least didn't say anything weird like "fullwidth latin capital letter t fullwidth latin capital letter h" or anything, but it does spell it out, which isn't ideal either

one anecdote.

required alt text on images is a pretty big want with disability rights advocates on bluesky. a significant part of that want is the huge amount of textual information that is frequently embedded in images, but having some text to contextualize any image is desired.

there is a willingness in the community to use tagging and volunteers to reduce the friction of generating text, to provide threads that annotate images, and to work around a frequently unwilling platform provider. some refuse to interact with unannotated images.

still images are the only thing you can attach to bluesky posts, so that project could, in theory, address the totality of their alt text needs atm.

refusing to interact with images that have no alt text is transparently absurd, because i have never seen anyone refuse to interact with images that have bad alt text

there are probably a zillion platform features that could exist here. and also a zillion client-side features. and then the pie-in-the-sky dream where you can take something like a screenshot but it captures the source and the text and whatnot as well. but alas we keep scurrying around rebuilding "post text on a website" in different ways

what is patently absurd is definitely is a highly personal point of view. i feel like this shits on communities who try to shape the platforms they're on in the ways they have available to them.

i'm not saying this particular example is a solution for cohost, but users have to constantly deal with the friction of assumptions about what is "patently absurd"

sorry, to be more charitable and constructive: i think it is not necessarily very good at shaping the platform because it measures solely whether the text exists, with no advice or feedback for what kind of text is actually useful or not. the approach seems like it will work better at "providing an easy litmus test for a thing to chastize others about" than it will at "definitively improving the accessibility of images on the platform", and the former makes the vibes worse for everyone

"Automatically grab text from any posted image and put it as alt text if no user-defined alt text is submitted" doesn sound that pie-in-the-sky, just basic OCR. And especially since most images of text are screenshots of text, that should make the OCR basically trivial.

normative conflicts like this on social media are fascinating to me. I'm currently studying this exact thing for my phd

there's an inherent chilling effect to being told not to do something, which gets amplified by the way that message is presented. the tone, the phrasing, the number of people saying it, the proposed path to remediation, all impact the presence and degree of any chilling effects. and they're really important! even if that person goes to a space with different norms that allow their previous behavior, or the norms of their current space change, they still hesitate to engage in the same behavior that got their hand smacked the first time. once bitten, twice shy

this is really important if "the behavior" is something like "posting a fundraising link so I can make rent" or "calling out bigotry online". but even in lower stakes discussions like "engaging with this website that needs engagement to survive" or "putting lots of effort into posts that aren't accessible", if that behavior is subject to chilling effects then the website suffers

for a brief time i decided i would alt text everything, but then i had the palpable experience — multiple times! — of discovering i didn't have the energy to write a sufficient caption for an image... so instead i didn't post the image at all.

which made it inaccessible to everyone!

so i am having to settle for best-effort, because tbh every other facet of my posts is already best-effort

I agree with 95% of this, but I'm still going to describe my images instead of just punting on it for two reasons:

  1. I do think vision-impaired people benefit from context in the cases where an image supplements text. If I was listening to a long-form post and the text said something vague, and then I heard "[image]", I would assume the image is important to understanding the text. The description of the image could still supplement the text even if the experience isn't the same as seeing the image. Images are used for reasons other than to showcase art and photography.

  2. Writing image descriptions is actually kinda fun for me. Case in point. -- and, I think more to the point -- it becomes easier to do, and creates the habit of doing it, if you approach it as something whimsical or a writing challenge, rather than a chore. But then, I do enjoy writing challenges and not everyone does.

re your first point, I benefit from alt-text not because of vision impairment, but because of slow connections. if I can immediately see "art of a fox" or whatever I know what the post is about, and can decide whether I want to wait for half a minute for the image to load or not

i do almost 100% of my cohost browsing - my primary social media place - in my screenreader. i think your point about yardsticks is good. i think it'd be better if we had better conversations, and if requests for accessibility and pushback against secondhand requests were both more civil. the app i use for everything on my phone does fine with the double struck text and the mathematical formula. formulae? functions. I like cohost compared to twitter because it works with my screen reader at all rather than basically not working at all. I like that there's a slow march towards accessibility, and that people care, even if they are clumsy. I think there's probably a curb-cut effect when it comes to making things clear in text, and it's easy to forget that ten years ago people would respond entirely in gifs. it's nice that that that's not the primary means of communicating, and I don't know if the trend back towards text is one driven by aesthetics or (accessibility) ethics, probably the former. I like thinking that people are trying their best, and I also think we could rethink our attitudes or approaches to alt-text.

So, I understand where you're coming from - most people can't be expected to learn and remember every quirk of screen readers. It's not a moral failing to not understand details of web development if you're just a user of a website. (I do think it is extremely unfortunate that the majority of web developers never learn about or implement accessibility. It gives my partner lots of job security, but... Dang.)

And you're right, "photo of my cat" isn't very useful as alt text. That's why any good guide for alt text talks about the context of an image.

For example, say someone posts a picture of their cat on top of a fridge, and in the body of a post says "he's up so high!" No alt text at all makes the post meaningless (who is up high? why is this posted?). "My cat" is somewhat better, but still kind of lacking. Where is the cat? But the alt text "A black cat peers down from on top of a fridge" fully describes the context as well as what makes it relatable and funny to post. It's enough info to include a person using a screen reader in the conversation.

And it's true many people talking about screen readers (at least on Cohost) don't have life experience with this. But there are blind folks who do talk about this stuff, as well as UX and accessibility professionals who work directly with disabled users, and it's worth searching them out (in that order).

I can't find the Mastodon post right now, but a screen reader user posted there that the alt text culture on Mastodon compared to Twitter made them cry because they felt so included. That's why I and other are so passionate about this. No, a user isn't a "bad person" if they don't use alt text. But the Internet would be a lot better if more people learned to write good alt text and used it, and if web developers implemented accessibility and made it easier for users to do their part.

(Also, on the mathematical symbols thing - using them as they were not designed on social media was annoying for a lot of screen reader users. But I don't think it's on screen reader software for being bad, because screen readers do handle math when given enough information to actually describe it in a human understandable fashion- mathml (video example included) with a screen reader sounds very different to the example you wrote out. There's a lot of work that goes into making stuff like educational materials accessible, and I don't think it's really fair to compare that to a screen reader encountering isolated characters on a social media website.)

sorry for the brevity here but i note that math doesn't only exist in an educational context?? sometimes people just like to post about math. on platforms, even. and using unicode math characters to spruce it up a bit in a plaintext environment like twitter isn't a wildly unreasonable thing to do.

I am genuinely trying to stay on an even keel about this, since I don't use a screen reader habitually and it's not in my lane, but it seems like at least every 2 weeks I have someone on some microblogging platform or other chiding me for not providing alt text, regardless of the following conditions:

  1. that scrolling back on my feed would reveal that I do provide alt text on almost all images,
  2. that the post itself functions as an image description and adding "alt: a photo of a black cat" to "check it out, my cat reached out and touched my phone screen and took a selfie [image]" would be redundant,
  3. the person in question does not follow me, or appear to use screen readers or other assistive tools themselves, and 80% of their replies are finding people who didn't use alt text so they can scold them.

this specific combination of things is starting to get so far up my nose it's sticking out my ear.

This is the sort of thing that you effectively cannot do if you are not in control of the platform, though. There's no "leave off the alt" vs "empty alt" selector on any platform I've ever seen.

Last I checked WordPress automatically adds an empty alt tag to images without defined alt text.

But yes, absent an ability to mark something decorative or automatic actions on the platform side, this is why it's a best practice to always add alt text on social media. Besides, if you're adding an image to a post, it usually has content and isn't decorative, anyway.

the typical counterpoint to this is that, if you can't see the image, you can't tell you aren't missing anything — someone forgetting to add alt text appears exactly the same as someone deciding that alt text is redundant

I ran into a recent thing where on Tumblr I made very thorough alt text for a transcript of an image that was a chat screenshot, and made a note of saying "transcript in alt text," and then a few reblogs later someone took it upon themselves to add an [id: (blah blah blah)] to the reblog, after someone else had complained about the lack of an image description!

I don't think the platforms are really lending themselves that well to making this shit better.

on Twitter before alt text was easily visible to non-screenreader users (without doing an inspect-element or similar) I had someone tag in one of those alt-text transcription bots, then get mad at me for blocking the bot, on an image that had alt text. like, it has always been like this. some people just want to yell.

From the perspective of building websites and features, I think an underrated issue is that the web makes it kind of easy to fuck up accessibility. There was a phrase I remember hearing a while ago that was something like “the web is accessible by default, we just broke it by trying to make applications instead of documents,” but like, people are going to make applications on the web, and I don’t think it’s desirable to not make them in 2023.

There’s a lot of features like comboboxes and other UI stuff that are pretty common, but not really in HTML by default, and when they do, they aren’t always customizable in the way people would like. The select element is a good example of this. ARIA exists to help bridge that gap, but it’s really low level and easy to mess up!

I think you talk about that feeling of “being afraid of being criticized for making something inaccessible” and while I think there’s a community component to that, I think a lot of it ultimately stems from the fact that the web makes it really easy to make something inaccessible and won’t tell you about it.

I dunno, I do a lot of accessibility work in my day job, and it’s rewarding. But it’s also hard, and not everyone has a full day and the resources to think through these issues and the tradeoffs they involve, especially if they’re just making a shitpost.

"drawing of a fox" - is this a deliberately bad example? like yeah, alt text that takes less than 3 seconds to think of and type out is not going to be of much use to anyone.

as far as i can tell there is no objective benchmark for "good alt text", because it has too many potential goals (blind accessibility, transcribing text better than OCR, being a placeholder for an image that's failing to load, providing context or attribution), some of which will conflict at some points. it is always a judgment call. i have always approached it like that - a "best effort" on the part of the poster to describe the visual parts of something that are describable, and also make sure it's easier to find from text processing operations like search. no two people are going to make the same choices there just as no two people are going to express a thought in words in the same way. because of that inherent subjectivity, i think people need to be patient with each other and with the overall practice, especially as it's still being mainstreamed. and yeah imo that involves not being so hardline you're just shitty to people and blaming them for stuff they don't understand but are likely very persuadable about, and also not acting (as we saw during some of mastodon's userbase growth spurts) like best effort is some egregious woke imposition.

re: reasonable use of rare/nonstandard characters in posts, to hear the people most vocally against them tell it, i am honestly shocked that screen reader technology has not done even the bare minimum to keep pace with how text online has changed (hugely for the better, largely!) in the past 10-15 years.

it's a sort of example i have grappled with with art. alt text for a drawing often feels like a choice between something direct and bland that doesn't really convey why the picture even exists, or a task that feels similar to being asked to explain why a joke is funny

the alt attribute was conceived, and is still explained by the w3c, largely as a tool for illustrations or diagrams within a larger body of primarily text. sometimes it's not really clear what i'm even trying to accomplish with alt text on visual art

how many seconds would you like someone to take on describing their purely ornamental drawing

it's pretty trivial with charts or banners or things alt text was really designed for (inasmuch as it was designed for anything, and not a "gee I dunno we can't fix the problem but we can do this"), but if there was a really good tweet-length elevator pitch that could stand in for your drawing if you spent a minute really pondering I think you'd reach the end of that minute with the conclusion that you shouldn't have bothered draw it.

i think comparing people requesting accomodations for their disabilities to someone who is mad you're not speaking the same language they do is kind of disrespectful, to be honest... that seems tasteless.

talking about the rest of the post, "not everything is for everyone" is a fair and true sentiment, but much of the time when people are asking for alt text it's for shit where people just... take a screenshot of some text, or post a response in an image that is easily summarized. sure, describing a cat doesn't enable someone to actually see the cat, but it's not as black and white as that. often times providing context with alt text is actually useful.

i am extremely running out of steam at this point so all i can offer is the train of thought i had reading this

  • the guy's inability to read japanese is different because he could hypothetically change that, but realistically he won't, and he certainly can't in the short timeframe in which my tweet is on his screen (or even within the duration of my trip)

  • so the immediate issue is "here is a thing, that this person literally cannot access"

  • of course having no vision makes entire genres of things inaccessible whereas this guy only couldn't read specifically my tweets for two weeks

  • i didn't think of the request itself as the comparison though, it's more like it sticks in my head because it's fascinating that this particular person was so put off that one person they followed was tweeting in a way they couldn't read for what had been maybe a week at that point. and the parallel is that language is also an access barrier, not the circumstance. but i can see how that comes across

  • there are automated tools that sorta-kinda help with language barriers though

  • but now there are also automated tools that sorta-kinda help with the visual barrier. generative images are based on existing tech for identifying images. why did all that effort go into generating garbage instead of using the previous stuff as assistive tech

i can feel myself becoming incoherent in real time. it's fucked up that the web devolved to the point where sharing stuff on other websites is most commonly accomplished by posting screenshots. and hell we can't even manage screenshots, those slowly disintegrate too

It'd be cool if I could just link a screen reader to people who don't get how all the alt text shit works, or spend a lot of time yelling about how it must hypothetically work, but lmao JAWS costs as much as industrial CAD software, which is why nobody who isn't legally required to is designing for it and the ones who are generally just do it by nixing images and any new feature that arrived on the internet after 1995.

anyway, from my experience using readers to assist people who weren't totally no-visual-perception blind, just too blind to read anything or navigate quickly, more or less you hover or tab over elements and it reads out whatever text it can find in the block, about as accurately as any other TTS program does, which means some will handle a given input just fine and others will suddenly start speaking in tongues. I never encountered whatever unskippable alt tag issue is at the center of the cohost furor and nobody will name what they're actually using so I can't speak to that, maybe in my version they hadn't patched that in yet, maybe this is a specific quirk of some terrible shovelware product one guy has ever actually used, it certainly didn't seem to be some kind of universal standard. There barely is a standard, there's just a collection of poorly designed products everything is mediated through. It's like using the internet back when every browser rendered pages completely differently, except IE costs $100/yr and instead of fucking up the page layout because it's two versions out of date from the release the page was tested on it just gives up and doesn't show that element.

A thing that strikes me in the comments here is that people are having two totally different conversations based on what they've seen - some people who have only seen kinder, more genuine alt text requests who don't get your framing, and some people who have mostly seen the really aggressive demands.1 Feels like the decentralized nature of this kind of site makes it hard for everyone to even be on the same page for a conversation.


  1. As someone who's seen someone on this very site accuse people of being Nazi-adjacent and not thinking disabled people are human for not using alt text right... well, yeah.

the bit that gets me is that often the images i post are screenshots of text from a thing i'm linking to, and that could easily be OCRed with the device i am posting them with. but no social media platform i know of has OCR built in in order to fill in an alt text box.

oh, sure, i haven't been pasting screenshots of text here as a habit. but also i use Mastodon & Bluesky & Twitter previously, and those have a character limit & limited formatting options.

also sometimes you read things in books & don't want to type them out

i mean, whatever works! we have the technology!

i guess i am thinking specifically of OCRing, because that's what i would like to do with Downpour once i actually get alt text working, and so i have thought about how to implement it. copying the text along with the screenshot would be super nice, but is not something i could add singlehandedly. i would be like "one engineer could add this feature", but then i remembered that all many the social platforms i use are hugely under-resourced in terms of engineers... except Instagram, which doesn't even have alt text support to start with.

You *made fun of the person you're subposting about *thoroughly enough, they've left the site. Idk if that was your intent but that was the impact of your difference of opinion about advocacy approach. Seems relevant to the conversation, I thought.

*Edits bc saying this isn't bullying is fair critique. Making fun of someone in five posts in a matter of hours, but never tagging or mentioning them, is not bullying, but is making fun of them. I'm typing this out sincerely, not sarcastically.

considering i, as a reader, don't know or have any way of knowing who that person even is, i'm not sure what else she could have done about this problem. this isn't a twitter quote-tweet "hey everyone brigade this person." the only alternative i can think of is "don't talk about anything while it's culturally relevant and might make you think about other people" which doesn't seem like a reasonable way to handle this.

half the post is about two twitter anecdotes, the beginning alludes to a tumblr phenomenon, and i had mastodon in mind throughout. if this post has somehow caused someone to abandon cohost then that's unfortunate, but i don't appreciate the framing of a post about a cultural trend as bullying

"thinking really hard" is a dig at myself for being a huge nerd who keeps falling for the alluring trap that all problems can be solved with sufficient databases

"alt images" is a reflection on broader meanings of "accessibility" and also an image of a kitten because i couldn't think of any better way to shoehorn a silly demo in

the broken image with a fake signature is the one thing riffing on the person in question, and it is more about other things. is that what you think is bullying? copying their format in an unidentifiable way?

Thanks for explaining; without knowing you, with your comment on another person's post about the user's signature, and in addition to the broken image and fake signature, it all read to me like you were very deliberately making fun of her. Glad to hear that's not the case. *also adding: regardless of what I thought, she certainly thought you were making fun of her and posted about leaving because of it. Unfortunate all around.

disagreeing with a stranger and making a brand new post talking about your thoughts on the topic without so much as mentioning that it was inspired by said stranger's opinion... does not in any way count as bullying.

Maybe I'm being a little flippant, but cohost is a website without slot machine-type UI, with a user base of 5 people, who also have no way of finding each other. Leaving it is akin to stopping going to the gym. I've seen someone leave over a moderation decision drama and go back to twitter. Lmao

They are. I'm sorry, I must have forgotten about it by the point I was writing the comment or maybe I was subconsciously more uncharitable than I intended to. I edited my comment. I still stand by what I said about leaving, though.

I have been writing up a reply about accessibility in game development that is now going to be a repost, cause it's about three paragraphs long and only increasing. Essentially creating any app with multiple systems, but especially games and social media, requires you to anticipate all use cases in the beginning, or you will spend magnitudes of time later on trying to duct tape solutions in later, to the point where it actually creates more problems for more users.

yeah i'm hoping to get some more direction eventually on what actually is helpful-- it's also an accessibility issue for me (person with chronic pain/frequent executive dysfunction) to be expected-or-else-i-am-designated-Bad to write alt text, video descriptions, audio transcriptions, etc. when they may or may not even be of use. sometimes i feel like i nail it with a description that would be useful and interesting to someone who can't see the thing; other times i have no idea how to describe, say, my pages of scribbly OC sketches of a bunch of characters nobody knows shit about and A Lot is going on and i'd have to write paragraphs to describe them aaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

i also don't want to assume what other disabled people are or are not interested in doing. i kinda hate when people assume for me what i can and can't engage with re: disability so i don't wanna just be like "well there's no way they would be interested in what i'm drawing, they can't see it". but i have a limited understanding of what i should be doing. the closest experience i have to using screen readers is maybe, like, using voice controls when my hands are super busted (which sucks, navigating anything without your hands is garbo). i think some of the energy directed at, say, yelling people for using special characters could probably be directed at screen reader software developers apparently not solving long-standing problems i've been hearing about for ages.

i hope i eventually hear from more actually blind people on this. there are some interesting replies here.

yeah i said elsewhere here that on several occasions i found myself just not posting at all when i couldn't muster up the energy to write a good caption. i'll take my current set of ailments over impaired vision, but it is kind of a bummer when they don't really factor into the discourse at all

i think a lot of people forget that disabilities can and do conflict with each other sometimes. at the same time, i can also imagine how frustrating it must be to feel left behind often... because like. i feel that way very often about packaging i can't open with my bad hands. or big-publisher-big-money video games and their absolute fucking refusal to let me remap controls, still, in the year of our lord 2023. but i would not like. shit on a solo gamedev about that LOL

i figure what i owe people is probably trying my best and giving everyone some grace

The funny thing is the macOS screen reader currently just skips anything that it doesn't see as being plain English text. So for example, in your doublestruck example, it says

sometimes i think about how people on twitter liked to have a good time, until there was a big uprising about it

and the equation just says "(something) equals two plus plus." I have no idea what the "(something)" is meant to be but I sure can't understand it. The "𝑓(𝑥)" on its own generates no sound, and "𝑓(𝑥) =" does the "(something) equals."

So yeah maybe screen readers aren't the accessibility win everyone thinks they are.

I feel you. I want to help folks but I also don’t feel like my alt text would help in any way? If you can’t view my image then would the alt text help? does “two people being romantic at each other” explain anything? And often trying to describe it better takes a lot of time and I’m unclear if it leaves an impact? How much description do folks need for it?

Even the most intense alt text I’ve done I’m unclear if I did it right, and in general I don’t think I could give this intricate a description for all my pieces. (The text was: “a digital portrait mimicking traditional oil portraits with intricate lace and fabric detail, of someone holding sword and flowers with nice lighting.”)

Even the most simple alt text in the world is more useful than nothing.

"Art I drew of two people" is better than no alt text. Because the alternative is someone using a screen reader just hearing "image". With this they know it's art you did. Otherwise it could just as easily be a photo of a dog, or a dick pic, or a pie chart of what percentage of fatal car accidents had seat belts vs no seat belts.

So if your question is "how useful.is that", the answer is very, because with no alt text the user has no idea what the image is. Even a little context is better than zero context.

Nope, because consider this--some people may post something like "my beautiful son" with a photo of their cat. Or "look at this weird cat" with a photo of a baby lamb. Text and image don't always match and someone who can't see the image can't know that.

Givin' you the benefit of the doubt that you aren't bein' intentionally obtuse here...

but i still don't even know what good alt text is.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+write+good+alt+text+for+images&ia=web

unless the alt text is some breathtaking prose (or the image is a comic with a joke that's funny on its own or something), it might as well say "art you can't see".

Would you tell that to a blind person who asked you what that thing they're passing by is?

instead the clear demand was for everyone — everyone — everyone — everyone — the entire human race to

provide ALT and non-formatted text in a convenient manner. For example: use a damn collapsible. This site makes it so much easier than tumblr.

and some guy complained because he couldn't read my tweets.

Being monolingual and blind are two very different things, even in this context. So you're either 1) saying ALT-less images are intended to be sighter-exclusive or 2) you believe not knowing a language is the same as not being able to read/see.

but not everything is for everyone. not everything can be for everyone.

so people who rely on screen readers can get fucked then? or are they just gonna "have to work harder"?

writing "photo of my cat" doesn't mean they can suddenly see the photo of my cat.

yes, and?
You showed the photo on your phone to the person next to you, but left out the person further away. So they asked "what is it?" and you answered "a photo of my cat" and now they're less excluded.
Did you seriously not understand this when you made your chost?

Is it safe to assume you no longer agree with yourself from 6 months ago? 'Cause damn.