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Increase character limit for alt text #4998

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mackuba opened this issue Aug 27, 2024 · 5 comments
Open

Increase character limit for alt text #4998

mackuba opened this issue Aug 27, 2024 · 5 comments
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feature-request A request for a new feature

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@mackuba
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mackuba commented Aug 27, 2024

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The max length for the alt text is set to 1000 right now at the UI level. This is often too little. It's more than enough when just describing what is in a photo etc., but very often the image is a screenshot of a post elsewhere, fragment of an article etc., and in such cases, people normally copy-paste the whole text from the original source, but many times I had to truncate some final part of the text I was copying.

I've even noticed that sometimes people add a second empty image only to be able to fit the complete alt text somewhere!

Some examples of that from the last few days, just search for "alt continued":

https://bsky.app/profile/ectscotland.bsky.social/post/3l2mcldnmrn2d
https://bsky.app/profile/whinterqueen.bsky.social/post/3l2ix4c4mgn2r
https://bsky.app/profile/ugobananas.bsky.social/post/3l2fx2y3h462f
https://bsky.app/profile/nambroth.bsky.social/post/3l2aqiulw732o
https://bsky.app/profile/barrydeutsch.bsky.social/post/3l2anazfqxv2g
https://bsky.app/profile/floregonian.com/post/3l23yqd3c232n

Some of my posts where the alt didn't fit:

https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3l2nfkqyqwk2z
https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3kyvm2vraq62s
https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/post/3kyenbo4zyw2d

Describe the solution you'd like

Increase the max limit for alt text. How much? Not sure 🙃 Enough that the text on such screenshots as in the examples above can all fit there.

@mackuba mackuba added the feature-request A request for a new feature label Aug 27, 2024
@mary-ext
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mary-ext commented Aug 27, 2024

There's a now-reverted pull request that set the alt text limit from none at all to 5k grapehmes in the lexicon, 5k seems more than enough.

@mary-ext
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Adding on to this, it would be really nice if the button to save the alt text just gets disabled rather than force trimming the alt text to be below the specified char limit.

@jcx616
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jcx616 commented Sep 17, 2024

This is a great idea. Hopefully, this can be implemented in the future,

@surfdude29
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surfdude29 commented Oct 4, 2024

The alt text limit has been increased to 2,000 characters now that #5611 has been merged.

I checked each of the images in the posts @mackuba linked above and 2,000 characters would easily be enough for all of them 👌

@cooljeanius
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Relatedly, simply displaying the character limit and count as per #1739 would help make it easier to avoid going over it

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