October 23rd, 2023 -- by Bacchus
Pornocalypse Comes For The Blind
Today I learned that software for the purpose of describing images to the blind all comes with #pornocalypse baked in. I don’t have details, only this report from Blind and Sexy on Mastodon:
Similar Sex Blogging:
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=31795
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=31795
I believe they are talking about the class of ‘AI’ systems that you were having fun with making alien sex shop images. These are trained models with layers of filters which yep, are almost universally censored.
Fortunately they are a recent thing, but sadly too many web masters are taking them as a signal to not do accessibility properly. Which is I agree hard work.
I won’t go into mad depth on accessibility, but every image should have an appropriate alt text, and the images themselves should have alt text and extended description per the IPTC spec in their metadata. If anyone wants links I can supply them to Bacchus to post.
It’s one reason why it’s important that metadata is not stripped, which it is automatically by those who wish to steal copyright etc. See Meta for example, who strip metadata from all images they touch. Ideally stripping metadata should be automatically prosecuted as breaching copyright, because stripping metadata facilitates third parties to claim or reuse them as orphaned works.
There are also the ‘ally’ tags which can be added to an image or video to supply extra text to screen readers, and videos can be placed inside a figure tag that allows specifically for captions and transcripts to be added.
In general, screen readers and the like will take the supplied text as is. If you go to the Kink page from the previous post and browse the images I found Voiceover (the mac built in screen reader) had no foibles about reading out the spicier alt text. Though the alt text is limited in length. Absolute best practise would be to add extra ally tags to give extended descriptions for the screen reader to speak.
So the post isn’t wrong, but it’s misleading slightly. It is absolutely possible for webmasters and creators to support the blind well. I do all the above on my own (not adult) photography site, and it doubles the time to process and post each image. It is non trivial and hard work.
I don’t use ‘AI’ systems at all, because they’re neither ‘I’ or unencumbered by hidden costs. But there is nothing to stop someone else training a model with well described adult content, in the same way Bacchus was using a model which allowed him to create adult content.
We just need someone to spend the time describing the content. Methinks crowd sourcing this could be fun, in the way certain websites crowd sourced tagging videos to categorise them. Maybe we should start by going back through the Erosblog archive and posting detailed descriptions of our favourite images for Bacchus. What say you Bacchus? Should we?
Some deaf people use voice to sign services, and sometimes they want a phone sex line to be translated, at least according to the edgy Australian film The Little Death.
Finagle, I don’t tell people what they “should” do, but I certainly wouldn’t mind having better image descriptions on ErosBlog. I’m not sure how best to display or affix them to the images, though. Just having them in a comment below the post would be way better than nothing, I suppose. With my current site design, at least, alt text is invisible to everyone who does not “inspect” the HTML, although it sounds like at least some screen reader software may find and read it. I’m thinking about how SEO has changed over the years and how I’ve used ALT text differently in the past; back when “keyword stuffing” was a thing I may have done some human-unfriendly alt texts, and even today if I post about nudists I’m very inclined to make sure the alt text has related keywords like “naturist” which isn’t as human friendly as it could be.
Honestly the accessibility issues weren’t on my radar very much until I started using Mastodon as my primary social media platform, where descriptive alt texts are a prescriptive social norm. The next ErosBlog template/design is going to need to be much friendlier to descriptive text, but that’s easy to say; in fact I’m years overdue for a redesign and the resources (time and money, in interchangeable amounts) to do it just aren’t there, right now or foreseeably. If my Patreon was subscribed at 10x the current level, my optimism for those future improvements would increase comparably.
Apropos the idea of crowd sourced alt text reminds me of “social tagging” which was a thing 15 years ago when WordPress was new. The idea was that site readers could tag images and the tags would enter the WordPress tagging system, subject to moderation of course. The plugins for doing this were not maintained and no longer work, sadly. I’d kill for a modern social tagging plugin with moderation features, and “social descriptions” would be a complementing feature if anybody wants to write one! Sadly I don’t have the programming skill to do it myself.