The Global Accessibility Awareness Day and the World Sight Day are observed annually on the third Thursday of May and on the second Thursday of October respectively.
In 2024, these days will fall on May 16 and October 10.
I propose to show solidarity with blind and vision-impaired folks on this day by disabling images on social media, and highlighting the importance of well-written image descriptions.
Image credit: Deivid Saenz
How to participate
If you are a fediverse administrator, see below for ways to temporarily disable images on your server.
Be sure to announce this ahead of time so that your community is prepared, as images suddenly disappearing without a notice would lead to confusion.
Otherwise, you can help spread the word about this event, reach out to your admin and see if they’d like to take part, or you can join in by only posting descriptions of images you’d otherwise post during this day.
Mastodon
On Mastodon, you can make the media upload folders write-only, so that images still get uploaded, but don’t load.
chmod 722 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/cache
chmod 722 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/media_attachmentsOnce you reset the folder permissions, all the images, including those that were uploaded during the event, will become accessible again.
chmod 777 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/cache
chmod 777 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/media_attachmentsIf you host your images externally, you should be able to change the value of the S3_ALIAS_HOST environmental variable to some random text. (Thanks to @trendless@zeroes.ca for the tip!)
Check back for instructions for other fediverse platforms!
Hm. I wonder if I can get any fediverse admins onboard to disable all images on their instance on the World Sight Day in October, so that only alt text shows up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Sight_Day
#accessibility#a11y#ImageDescription#AltText#FediAdmins#MastoAdmins
In solidarity with the blind and vision-impaired community, I propose that twice a year, on the World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day, fediverse admins disable images on their servers to highlight the importance of writing good image descriptions.
Who’s in?
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/fediverse-world-sight-day/
#accessibility#a11y#AltText#ImageDescription#WorldSightDay#FediverseWorldSightDay#GlobalAccessibilityAwarenessDay#BeAnAlly
FAQ
Can I post about this on my blog? Translate this to a different language?
Yes, please do! And let me know so that I can link to it!
Can this be done more often during the year?
Sure! You could even do a weekly #AltTextSunday. Whatever you choose as an admin, be sure to communicate this to your community ahead of time.
Who is participating?
Here’s a list of instances whose admins pledged to participate. Reach out to be added!
- s.basspistol.org
- linernotes.club
- mastodon.de
- mastodon.wurzelmann.at
- mementomori.social