I don’t have many fedi accounts, but looking at public Mastodon feeds it is very common to see people requesting others to add alt-text to their media and getting a lot of boosts/etc.
Is there any reason (beyond a very mild convenience) for some Mastodon instances not to require alt-text on media? It seems like something a lot of admins would want to do, given their general audience, and naively I’d say it’s very easy to implement.
In that (rare) situation, you can just say ‘picture of the bird’ to avoid being redundant!
Unfortunately, I believe you. Some people take counterpoints very badly, it’s notorious with twitter (and therefore ex-twitter) users.
My response is that demand, in that redundant situation, is insulting to people with visually-imparement and can be disregarded.