And much like going from phone call to answering machine to voicemail to visual voicemail (and even for a while being able to text a verbal reply on I believe Sprint back in the day for a bit) we now have phones being able to OCR images, then you can select the text on the image. (Also so the creepsters can harvest metadata on all your images.)
Degrading the text to image, then OCRing it is a lossy, more failure-prone waste of computing power than linking to source or just providing the text: it only poorly addresses 1 issue while adding extra steps.
We still lose web connectivity, authenticity, searchability, fault tolerance while impairing usability & accessibility.
I don’t think linking to the comment or pasting text is an extraordinary effort or harder than taking & clipping a screenshot, saving it to file, uploading it.
Since you didn’t understand it, here’s the full list of issues again:
Images of text break much that text alternatives do not.
Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
usability
we can’t quote the text without pointless bullshit like retyping it or OCR
text search is unavailable
the system can’t
reflow text to varied screen sizes
vary presentation (size, contrast)
vary modality (audio, braille)
accessibility
some users can’t read this due to lack of alt text
users can’t adapt the text for dyslexia or vision impairments
systems can’t read the text to them or send it to braille devices
web connectivity
we have to do failure-prone bullshit to find the original source
we can’t explore wider context of the original message
authenticity: we don’t know the image hasn’t been tampered
searchability: the “text” isn’t indexable by search engine in a meaningful way
fault tolerance: no text fallback if image breaks.
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.
And much like going from phone call to answering machine to voicemail to visual voicemail (and even for a while being able to text a verbal reply on I believe Sprint back in the day for a bit) we now have phones being able to OCR images, then you can select the text on the image. (Also so the creepsters can harvest metadata on all your images.)
Degrading the text to image, then OCRing it is a lossy, more failure-prone waste of computing power than linking to source or just providing the text: it only poorly addresses 1 issue while adding extra steps. We still lose web connectivity, authenticity, searchability, fault tolerance while impairing usability & accessibility. I don’t think linking to the comment or pasting text is an extraordinary effort or harder than taking & clipping a screenshot, saving it to file, uploading it.
Since you didn’t understand it, here’s the full list of issues again: Images of text break much that text alternatives do not. Losses due to image of text lacking alternative such as link:
Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.