First of all, I love that I can post to my blog and have that post automatically be posted to Mastodon as well. This has partially changed my relationship with my blog. I’m posting much more to my blog, knowing that I get an increased audience opportunity by also going to Mastodon.

Basically, I post to my blog and everything flows to Mastodon. I use the Mastodon Autopost plugin. This allows me to control whether a blog post goes to Mastodon or not (via a simple checkbox in the side panel). I installed this prior to the ActivityPub plugin being available. Plus, the ActivityPub plugin wants to use the name on my admin account, which is not my name, and I haven’t found an easy way to change that. Autopost works for what I want.

However, when I post, if I use the built-in Featured Image to set a featured image, the ALT-Text doesn’t stay with the image. That is, I’ve entered the ALT-Text for the image within the Media Library, but that ALT-Text doesn’t make it to Mastodon.

I frequently use a Featured image plugin that allows you to use a URL as the featured image. This is my preference since I don’t have to take up space on my server. If I use the Featured image plugin, I can click the Preview button and see the image, PLUS, I get an ALT-Text box. I can enter ALT-Text here and it will travel to Mastodon.

Mastodon has a culture of providing ALT-Text. I want to be a good citizen, respectful of users who need ALT-Text, and do the right thing.

So, this may be a tip that the Featured image plugin will allow you to provide ALT-Text (remember to click the Preview button to be presented with the ALT-Text box). OR, this might be a request to know if there is a way to get ALT-Text to travel from WordPress to Mastodon.

ShareOpenly logo Share this post on social media.
Print 🖨 PDF 📄 eBook 📱