Like describing a photo to a friend, how to write alt-text
15 May 2024
Web designers and bloggers have been able to use alternative text, often referred to as “alt-text”, to describe images and photos, for decades. Alt-text helps people with little or no vision comprehend a website image, so long as the description is reasonably accurate.
In recent years social media has caught up, and most channels, Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky among them, allow users to add alt-text to images they post.
The facility has left people wondering though about the best way to describe an image. Sadly, writing something like “a photo of my cat” as alt-text for a photo of a pet, doesn’t quite cut it.
A person with low vision knows your photo is of a cat, but is left wondering what sort of cat, what colour is the cat’s hair, and so on. So some degree of detail is useful.
Scott Vandehey, writing at Cloud Four, offers a straightforward suggestion for writing alt-text: imagine yourself describing something you’re looking at, to someone who you’re on the phone to:
I find people often get too wrapped up in what the “rules” are for alternative text. Sure, there are lots of things to be aware of, but almost all of them are covered under this simple guideline. If you were talking to a friend on the phone and wanted to describe a meme you saw, you might say “There was this dog wearing safety glasses, surrounded by chemistry equipment, saying ‘I have no idea what I’m doing.'”
The great thing about writing alt-text is the way you can write it once, say on a Notes file, but publish indefinitely, depending how many channels you end up posting the image to. It’s what I do now. Write a caption and alt-text first, then start posting across my socials.
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social media, technology, trends
A simple text editor named Tine, by Martin Dorazil
15 May 2024
A text editor without the bells and whistles, called Tine. A nice name for a text editor.
The main goal of this editor is to keep the focus on the text editing and not be distracted too much by buttons, tabs, menus, and animations.
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Angel Baby, a story of doomed loved, and changing Australian accents
14 May 2024
A scene from Angel Baby, a film by Michael Rymer, depicting stars Jacqueline McKenzie and John Lynch.
Angel Baby, trailer, is the 1995 debut feature of Australian filmmaker Michael Rymer. You may have seen some of his other work: Battlestar Galactica, Hannibal, both TV series, and/or his 2012 feature, Face to Face, but likely you’ve not have heard of Angel Baby.
Filmed in Melbourne, Angel Baby tells the story of a doomed love shared by Kate (Jacqueline McKenzie) and Harry (John Lynch), both of whom are battling severe mental illnesses. I won’t say too much more about it, except to note this is an example of under-appreciated Australian cinema.
And, possibly, an exemplification of how Australian accents have changed over thirty years. I say this because I was amazed at how distinct, how strong, some of the actor’s accents were. I live in Australia, and am surrounded by people with Australian accents.
That’s obviously a no-brainer — well, to an extent — but it means generally Australian accents should sound “neutral” to me, because I’m exposed to them daily. Mostly, that is. I spend several days a week in Sydney, a diverse city. Here, Australian accents are only a sample of the many I hear daily.
Perhaps this accounts for why I found some of the accents in Angel Baby so pronounced, so unmissable, because in reality I am not wholly immersed by them. But it seems to me, to detect an accent, local to the region you reside in, which may otherwise seem indiscernible, you need to go outside that area, to begin to perceive it.
I spent several years in London, England not Canada, and after a few months could easily detect Antipodean accents. It was an odd sensation to speak on the phone to lifelong friends living down under, and notice their accents. To notice, effectively, my accent. I wonder if you can pick up my accent on the phone, to lift a line from the Waifs’ 2002 song, London Still.
Australian accents are said to fall into three main categories: broad, general, and cultivated. The Australian accents I detected in Angel Baby had to be in the board category. Of course, there are any number of explanations as to why the accents seemed pronounced.
Could it be I was hearing not wholly familiar Melbourne variations of the Australian accent? Or could it be some of the actors were asked to emphasise their accents, Angel Baby being an Australian production, and all. Perhaps Rymer wanted people, particularly overseas audiences, to make no mistake they were watching an Australian film.
But I also began wondering if the internet was playing some part in my hearing Australian accents on Australian soil? Angel Baby was made in 1995. The year after 1994, which Angela Watercutter, writing recently for Wired, described as the last year before culture began to migrate online.
Could it be imagined Australian accents were among this migration, where they began to blend with every other English language accent, every other accent full stop, and begin altering? Of course, accents from other global regions are still distinct. I have no trouble discerning, for example, Irish, North American, or English accents.
Or those of other cultures, because different accents stand out. But might thirty years of internet culture, monoculture perhaps, be making a difference? Unlike thirty years ago, today we are constantly hearing, constantly absorbing, the voices of speakers from across the globe, on the web, and social media.
Might this be resulting in accents — I don’t know — dissolving into each other a bit? Are we unwitting students of elocution lessons, being served up through the world wide web? Accordingly, a “normal” Australian accent of thirty years ago, may sound quite different today. But who knows? Perhaps I am only imagining this would-be diction.
One thing is certain though. If you have the chance, look at Angel Baby. If you’re a Kanopy member, it may be available in your region.
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film, Jacqueline McKenzie, John Lynch, language, Michael Rymer, trends
Unwanted AI-generated content has a name: slop
14 May 2024
Seen at Simon Willison’s Weblog:
Not all promotional content is spam, and not all AI-generated content is slop. But if it’s mindlessly generated and thrust upon someone who didn’t ask for it, slop is the perfect term for it.
Spam and slop. Now there’s a diet guaranteed to be bad for your health and mental well-being.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
An Australian study on IndieWeb, decentralised social media
13 May 2024
Wing Pang is studying Design in Visual Communications at the University of Technology, Sydney, in Australia. As part of the degree course, she’s doing an assignment looking at IndieWeb, and decentralised social media, such as Mastodon. She’s interested in hearing the views of people on the subject, and if you’re interested in offering your thoughts, you can do so via this study form.
Pang will be using the data she gathers here, as the basis for creating an easy to understand guide to Small/IndieWeb, for people who are new to the topic. The study only takes a few minutes to complete, so is well worth considering.
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IndieWeb, social media, trends
Share links on your personal website like it was a socials channel
13 May 2024
Matthias Ott, writing at Own Your Web:
Today, social media sites have made it seductively convenient to quickly post links that will immediately be rewarded with views, likes, and reposts. As a result, many of us seem to instinctively drop most of the interesting links we find right into the timelines of the many — oh, so many! — social media silos. With the recent revival of personal websites and blogs, however, a lot of people are rediscovering a more thoughtful and persistent alternative: sharing links on their personal websites.
I’ve always considered disassociated to be a link blog — as well as being a regular blog — and have frequently posted one sentence posts embedding a link to something I found interesting. Awhile back, I set up a separate WordPress category for them, but haven’t used it much recently.
So yes, my socials channels took precedence, and then sometimes I’d add them here. I was also wary of upsetting certain of the search engines, who seemingly will only consider a post for indexing, if it is made up of at least three hundred words.
This according to the SEO experts, you understand. I know this not to be wholly true though, as one of my most popular posts with a certain search engine, weighs in at about two hundred words, and two years on, traffic still flows in. I think trying to figure what search engines will, or won’t do, is like trying to time the markets, when it comes to making a financial punt.
No matter what you might know about a certain asset class, the market will always do its own thing, whether you’re betting for or against a certain price movement.
But I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the search engines, one in particular, but I think when it comes to sharing links, I might let it be. So going forward, I’ll look at posting links in short posts, to items of interest. Which you’ve probably seen anyway, but no matter. But not today, since I’m writing this on a Sunday night, instead of a Friday afternoon.
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IndieWeb, social media, trends
Everything good and bad, but mostly very bad, about smoking
10 May 2024
A Screen cap of Kurzgesagt’s Smoking is Awesome YouTube video.
This month Kurzgesagt takes on smoking. If you’re a non-smoker, this may help you understand why people like to have a puff:
Smoking helps you focus at work and is an excuse to take regular breaks, which is good for you mentally. It’s a tool against boredom, it suppresses your appetite, it makes bad moments feel less bad and good moments better. It’s social, fun together and a good way to make friends as smokers always group up. Your lips are one of the most sensitive parts of your body and putting something between them is deeply satisfying.
But smoking is a double-edged sword; the longer you partake, the greater your risk of suffering from heart disease, cancers, and all sorts of other maladies.
This should be a classroom educational resource.
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education, health, science, video
Can blogrolls build communities online? I think so
9 May 2024
A screen cap of disassociated’s links page, circa November 1999. Them were dark days…
Daniel Prindii asks, could blogrolls form the basis of community building online? Well, once upon a time, when they were known as links pages, that’s exactly what they did.
But with the development of AI tools, spam, and SEO-optimized articles the experience of the web search is a horrible one, where the chances to discover something new minimal. The 404 Media team has made a good analysis of this change. Everyone goes online to learn new things, and to connect with close friends. When your search or feed is clogged with spam and bots, it defeats the whole purpose.
In a way, the early search engines defeated the purpose of link pages and blogrolls. Later, some of them penalised websites carrying blogrolls, as they believed they were made up of paid links. And that was the beginning of the end of blogrolls. But not in the Indie Web/Small Web corner of the web. Here they are common, and serving their original, and perfectly innocuous, purpose of sharing websites a blogger likes, and thinks their readers will enjoy.
With discovery becoming ever more difficult by way of the search engines, the day of blogrolls has come again. To that end, I’ve set up, or maybe reinstated after a long hiatus, a blogroll here. It’s a start, and something I’ll add to over time.
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blogs, history, technology, trends
To make the longest ever baguette bakers must go the extra mile
8 May 2024
Meanwhile, back in the real world… chefs in France recently made the world’s longest ever baguette, which clocks in at a… morsel over one-hundred and forty metres in length. (My question: did they create the world’s largest oven to cook up this oversize stick of bread?)
I thought a one-hundred and forty metre long baguette was impressive, until I read in the same article that Italian bakers made a baguette about one-hundred and thirty-five metres long, a few years ago. (My question: why?)
The problem with the French record breaking effort though, is an extra five metres isn’t really a whole lot. Someone else will come along soon, and bake one that’s one-hundred and fifty metres long. If the French had made a baguette that was, say, one kilometre long, that would be a feat that might stand for some time.
In other words, to hold the world record for baking the world’s longest baguette, chefs really need to go the extra mile.
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In search of the last internet cafe on Earth
7 May 2024
Homepages and personal websites may be on the way back, but what of that other venerable staple of the early web: internet cafes?
In the late 1990’s they were everywhere. Venture onto any suburban shopping strip, and there’d be at least one net cafe in amongst the other shops. When I first acquired the disassociated.com.au domain name in 1998, we went into a net cafe so I could see the website on a computer that did not belong to me, or anyone I knew. To believe the disassociated domain name really existed, and was live online, I had to load the URL into the browser on a device alien to me.
I may’ve told this story elsewhere, somewhere here, before.
But ten years later, well into the first decade of the twenty-first century — the noughties, or aughts, if you must — net cafes were still common place. I used to do contract work, and not every workplace I went to had full internet access for all employees. Many, initially, granted unfettered access only to those at managerial level. Contract staff were deemed too risky for the privilege. Who knows what sort of websites they might lookup while the meter was running.
I was at one such place, near Central Station in Sydney, and on lunch breaks, used to regularly visit a net cafe, located below street level. The place practically had the atmosphere of a night-club; the room was dimly lit, and music blared out of a surround-sound speaker system. And it was massive. There was long row after long row of small cubicles, each hosting a desktop computer.
And it was always busy; remember we’re talking circa 2008 here. It was located a few hundred metres from one of Sydney’s largest universities, so that may have had something to do with its popularity. It seems hard to believe the place is gone now.
As they all have, from just about everywhere. But there are exceptions, and if you look hard enough, or travel far enough, you might stumble upon one of these remnants of the web’s early days.
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