this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Microblog Memes
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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
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the question is do you need at least one blind person to justify alt text or do you want the alt text to make it possible for blind people or people with impaired vision to enjoy if they ever stumble upon it?
This! I often hear certain restaurants don't have ramps because disabled people don't eat there. And we don't because there's no ramp.
If an uncaptioned tree falls in the woods without any blind people around...
Its a genuine question: how much enjoyment does someone with a visual impairment get from a meme that's purely a visual gag? You could go through a lot of work to make a cliff face wheelchair accessible but it will never be the same experience as rock climbing
Blindness is a spectrum! So for example, someone could maybe make out the stick figure shape in a comic but not the speech bubbles. Most blind people can still see things but it greatly helps to have things read out as an aid to quite literally see the whole picture :)
And now I wanna try rock climbing as a wheelchair user just because, lol
Very fair point ๐
your analogy makes no sense, and neither does your argument.
first of all the purpose of making places wheelchair accessible is to make it possible for people in wheelchairs to go there, not to give them "the experience" whatever the fuck that is supposed to be.
like, what do you even know what the wheelchair experience is like, and what makes you think what people in wheelchairs want is the experience of rock climbers, rather than the ability to experience something themselves? have you ever seen an interpreter sign a rap song? what do you think that's for? to stimulate hearing?
second of all, memes are rarely "purely visual" gags. I don't even know what makes you even think that. because they're in an image format? you do realize a woman staring at her boyfriend who's checking out another woman is in no way a visual gag, right? it's not about how they look, it's what they're doing.
or, to argue on a more basic level, if it's purely visual why does it have fucking words?
My question simplified: when is the juice worth the squeeze? Most memes have text but lose their humor without the visual aspect.
It's the difference between a comedian nailing the delivery of a punchline with a perfect impression + cadence + body work and reading a transcript of the bit.
In your rap interpretation example there are both visual and lyrical components to the performance, both of which are significant and individually enjoyable pieces of the art. A better example would be handing sheet music to a deaf person so they could enjoy an orchestra on tv.
On the girlfriend gag: it absolutely is visual. The nuance of the expressions and body language directly increase the effort and skill required to reproduce it.
I could accurately describe it "A man holding hands with woman who looks at him. He looks at a third woman. Captioned [...]". I could spend more time to better convey the humor but the delivery is no longer the meme. It can only ever be as good as my own ability to describe it in a parallel work.
From that logic, would the blind even be enjoying same content anymore? There are images that translate easily and readily to text, and I agree that everyone should be in the habit of trying to do it. But in making it a rock solid rule it kind of loses the spirit of inclusion in favor of dogma.
On a more basic level, if you could easily write the joke in text why is it an image?