Zagorath

Absolutely horrid feature. Supposedly it's to protect vulnerable people's privacy if they post in certain communities, but if they truly wanted that to be how it's used, they'd have limited the ability to apply the feature only to subreddits where mods have specifically coordinated with the admins to get approved as places where vulnerable people are posting. Or, and here's a shocker, they could just rely on the tried-and-tested method of using alt accounts. Instead, bots and trolls just hide their entire post history from people.

Now, supposedly, mods can see the full, unhidden history of any user who has recently posted in their subreddits. Which is good. But the number of other good-faith users being obstructed by this change is huge. It's overall a massive failure from Reddit.

My take is that everyone does it for their own posts, it's not actually that much effort. And it's an amount of effort that's worth it, to make the threadiverse a more welcoming and accessible place. If even one post I transcribe is seen by one blind or vision-impaired user, I'll consider the work worth it.

The fediverse broadly is already far better for accessibility than sites like Reddit and Twitter, with users in general far more likely to be aware of things they can do to promote access for users with special needs. But we can still do better, especially our threadiverse corner of the fediverse. Considering one of the reasons for outrage over Reddit dumping their API was the impact on users of blind-focused third-party apps, that's particularly disappointing.

That's a pretty good point. For these standard template memes I usually go to Know Your Meme and copy/paste the relevant section of their description. In this case it looks like they said "also landing on it", which I think is supposed to get across the same idea, but it does seem easy to read that without getting the intended idea.

My ideal hope is that by modelling good behaviour, I can encourage more OPs to provide transcriptions themselves in the body or the alt-text field.

If OPs take my transcriptions and edit it into the body, that's pretty good too. Especially if more people take up the work so transcriptions get posted on posts that I don't do myself.

The algorithm is far too fickle for me to have even considered my comment getting upvoted to the top. Good if it happens I guess, but not in my consideration.

Yeah, it's much, much better if OPs provide their own transcription. It's much easier to see that way. Mastodon and Pixelfed both basically yell at you if you don't do it, and it's a shame that Lemmy isn't the same.

For small transcriptions, there's an "alt text" field in the post itself, and for longer ones, they can be placed into the body of the post.

I vaguely recall the same thing from something fantasy, but can't recall what. I decided to brave TV Tropes to see. I got this:

[In A Song of Ice and Fire,] Chella daughter of Cheyk wears a necklace of ears from defeated enemies. Unusually for the trope, all of them had been left alive — they can come back to challenge her and get their ears back if they ever find the courage.

and then again in the TV show section:

[In Game of Thrones,] Chella daughter of Cheyk, the chieftainess of the Black Ears, stays true to her tribe's custom of stringing the ears of defeated foes on a necklace. She can be seen taking a new pair in "Baelor".

And in Western Animation:

At one point in Blue Eye Samurai, Heiji Shindo tries to buy Mizu off from her revenge quest, offering a fortune in gold and a position as a lord, with the price being that she must cut off her right thumb, so she can never wield a sword against Shindo and Fowler again. After making the offer, he shows Mizu and Taigen a box with a small collection of severed thumbs, in various states of decay.

In "Lair of Grievous" [in The Clone Wars], Kit Fisto and Nahdar Vebb discover that Grievous collects the padawan braids from young padawan learners he's killed.

But that's the best I could find. Definitely not ringing a bell for me.

Interesting. What client are you using? It displays fine for me in lemmy-ui (the default Lemmy web app).

I hope this helps rather than being pedantic & annoying?

Absolutely it does! Unfortunately Lemmy and Piefed clients are...inconsistent, at best, when it comes to how some of the finer points of syntax get parsed. Spoiler text is among the worst contenders, because of how non-standard the syntax is (second-worst contender: superscript & subscript). I'll try adding in the newlines and hopefully it won't cause any extra problems, but I can't guarantee it'll help.