@rick_777

And it doesn't have to be an entire novel, either. If you just want to type, "Black cat in red chair" do that.

@rick_777 If your image is mostly text (like a screencap of a Reddit or Twitter post), you can summon @OCRbot to create a best-effort image caption for you.

@rick_777 @PleaseCaption helped me train myself to always remember to do that

@rick_777 for quickly transcribing tweets and screenshots I recommend this application which is both ad and payment free:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.renard.ocr

It has some difficulty with the text on memes, but the text on those is generally much shorter and I don't usually have trouble captioning those.

I would still just quickly read through the text to make sure it matches the image. Honestly though I've tried it a couple times and it's pretty solid and a definite improvement over captioning by hand (especially on a mobile keyboard :p)

You can find other programs like it by looking for "image OCR" or "optical character recognition."

Fuck I've deleted and redrafted like three times now I'm sorry I'm done I hope this is helpful.

@rick_777 I'm just annoyed that mastodon app support for captioning images is patchy at best. I'm finding apps more convenient than browser tabs (which can quickly get lost in a sea of others even when pinned). I don't often post images though.

I have pinned an image but it's too complex for me to caption it without going past the character limit. I hope there's an alternative and accessible resource for my pinned image.