Last year in October, I looked at the data posted by @AltTextHealthCheck, an open-source bot, created by Stefan Hayden, that tracks what portion of images posted in the fediverse have a description. At the time, the bot has been only running for a few months. Now it’s been a bit over a year, and here’s how things are looking now.
It’s a bit hard to explain some of these jumps based on recent code changes, perhaps at least some of this is caused by new servers being discovered by the mastodon.social server through which all the data is collected. Another explanation could be that some servers might have rules about mandatory image descriptions. (This is not the case on mastodon.social.)
Either way, the relative trends over the past 12 months are fairly easy to observe. Mastodon.social, being a large and popular server, attracting a general audience, has been overall pretty steady. There is a slowly growing trend across most of the fediverse.
From various online polls I’ve collected, many clearly do care about accessibility on social media. But the results show an ongoing need for more outreach from accessibility advocates and better tools provided by various fediverse platforms.