Is there any way on Mastodon to automatically filter out image posts with no alt text?

@cryptids i would *love* this, but
last i looked into it, no

@det Yeah I did some looking into it and all I could find was a uBlock filter for it (and an old feature request thread on Github)

Shame, I guess I'll just resort to muting people or something

@cryptids i suppose that might work
i generally just try to avoid following folks who dont do media with alt text, usually if they alt text media most of what they boost will have alt text too, even if they dont care about if others do alt text or not

@cryptids Right now I don't think so. We'd need to reach out to developers to put in a feature request, methinks. I have no idea how that works.

@cryptids would love to know, because I'm personally done with accidentally boosting non-alt posts.

I hate retracting a boost, but my ethics say: no alt, no boost

@sortius @cryptids Same. It would be so much nicer to have them filtered

@cryptids Some instances, like mastodon.art, have CSS set up that puts a warning frame around media without alt text. Maybe it could be set up on your instance, or with a browser plugin? Plus, I suppose adblock for a more "nuclear" option..

@cryptids Our instance has "red line" markers on those images, and I think that's mostly CSS - so you can add a "user CSS" rule with a browser plugin to hide them. It might be part custom - I don't know.

There have also been guides for uBlock Origin and similar:
https://neilzone.co.uk/2024/02/suppressing-posts-containing-images-with-no-alt-text-in-the-mastodon-advanced-web-ui-via-ublock-origin/

@sortius @cryptids

There are browser plugins to directly show the alt text and color code, if it is missing.

For Firefox and Chrome:
https://nickdenardis.com/2023/01/14/social-visual-alt-text-mastodon/

@unixwitch @cryptids yeh, look, default Mastodon does that, that's not the problem. Unless you can make our brains not fart, this advice is useless

@cryptids perhaps @FediTips has an idea?

@cryptids I did a quick fork of Phanpy (web client) that hides posts with images without alt text.

It's on the client side:
https://github.com/cheeaun/phanpy/compare/main...martinwenisch:phanpy:main

I wonder if this would be an option. It'll be hard to push it to the upstream, as it's out of their scope. But if enough people would use it, I'd polish it with a settings switch and try.

Deployment of the changes here:
https://phanpy.muhu.digital

@sortius
I know some apps have a setting to show a warning before boosting media without alt text, but so far I'm unaware of an option to completely filter them out
@cryptids

@nightdice @cryptids yeh, but... web page mostly here, like many of us

@sortius
kinda figured, just wanted to put the info out there in case. Hopefully someone knows a decent workaround at least.
@cryptids

@cryptids A good question.

One can choose to be forced to provide ALT. Might be a client thing.

One small(?) thing: I’ve also noticed clients tend to offer slop-service generated ALT text. I however do prefer no ALT over confabulated slop. The null string beats the abomination.

@samerion @cryptids Yes, I have that CSS set up on my instance. Here it is:

.media-gallery__item-thumbnail img:not([alt]), .audio-player__canvas:not([title]), .video-player video:not([title]), .media-gallery__gifv video:not([title]), .media-gallery__item-thumbnail img[alt=""], .audio-player__canvas[title=""], .video-player video[title=""], .media-gallery__gifv video[title=""] {border: 2px dashed rgba(251, 47, 47, 0.5);box-sizing: border-box;}

@samerion @cryptids This only draws the red dashed border around the image. But with a bit of tweaking you could use this to hide the container of the toot itself. If you are not the instance maintainer, then you could ask them, or you would have to inject that CSS in some other way, like with a browser extension.

The toot will still be in the HTML, so I don't know how screen readers would process that (if that is the reason for hiding those toots).

@cryptids I don't think so, but an alternative solution is to use a browser extension like TamperMonkey that lets you inject css and/or javascript into any site.

If you were to set up a basic TamperMonkey script for the site(s) in question, the following will hide every post that has an image without alt text, or no alt attribute at all.

```
GM_addStyle('
article:has(img[alt=""]),
article:has(img:not([alt])) {
display: none;
}
');
```

See also: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/customize-website-experience-with-tampermonkey/