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@cordova5029 The most workable solution to the specific case of music is that it, like logos or similar, has an exception because there isn't a practical way to make all things accessible to all disabilities. It's kind of like saying "Blind people should be able to fly planes!" Well yes blind people should be able to do lots of things but flying planes just isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future for a whole bunch of reasons and it's just something that has to be lived with.

@cordova5029 Except this is a problem that musicians have been trying to solve for literal decades, and one of the criteria for anything being included in WCAG is that the technique has to be practical and actually work. Your solution of attempting to describe music via alt text isn't workable on several levels, let alone practical, and for Mastodon to push this is just performative accessibility.

@cordova5029 Yeah that's not how this works. At all.

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.