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Mastodon does this as a result of the culture of early adopters, and it's well-intentioned and wrong.

Yeah and I'm saying that Mastodon is wrong on this.

We could say this, but we don't, because WCAG provides techniques for making visual art accessible.

Not according to WCAG and the HTML spec with regard to the alt attribute. I'm glad that Mastodon's culture sort of cares about the basics of accessibility, but some of this stuff really is arbitrary and is contributing to fewer people making their content accessible since it unnecessarily complicates things.

For music/video you would use a transcript or in the case of video captions, but music is exempt from all this because the sound of the music is important to its enjoyment and can't really be communicated textually.

Wait why are you writing alt text for music? alt text is used for photos/other graphics, not video or music files.

@baruch Wait does this mean the time's run out on Elon's Israel Apology Tour and we're allowed to call him what he is, (an antisemite) again? Because for a minute there were certain segments of Jewish leadership who couldn't wait to stamp him as an ally and I'm just hoping we're done with that.