No. If I don't think including alt text is important, regardless of what others tell me, I will sometimes add alt text but I may forget to do it, I may decide not to when I'm in a rush, I may be in a mood where I can't be bothered to.

Someone who believes strongly in this may see every instance of me not adding alt text as a slight or as me being obstinate. They may start demanding I go back and add alt text to all my posts retroactively. I may very well refuse to do so, since, in this thought experiment, I don't think it's important enough to spend my time on it. They may get aggressive at this time, since their values are so different from mine.

For a more contrived example, if I told you it's important to me not to see people's shoes in pictures, would you entirely stop posting pictures like that? If you sometimes forgot, and I later asked you to crop all the pictures where you did, would you start doing it just because it's important to me?

I should note I have no idea if this is how things happened for GP. For all I know, they could be making up the whole thing. I'm just trying to point out how someone who is indifferent to X may end up in conflict with someone who is strongly for X.

Fair enough. Mastodon has, historically taken accessibility for visually impaired folk quite seriously.

Letting them be first class citizens is a laudable aim. I’m probably overly aware of it because I used to work at a school for VI students and I saw their frustration as they used their screen readers to find unlabelled images.

I don’t condone people being arseholes about it. But a bit of nagging to remind people is perfectly acceptable, think. You want to keep it the norm on the system.

It doesn’t need to be an essay. Just ‘a cute cat’ is better than nothing.

In my view it’s common courtesy to a group of people who already have it tough, not a ‘I don’t like shoes’ personal whim.