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.)

[–] lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Degrading the text to image, then OCRing it is a lossy (especially of semantic structure), 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 compared to 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
- semantic structure (tags for titles, heading levels, sections, paragraphs, lists, emphasis, code, links, accessibility features, etc) is lost
- 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
- image host is geoblocked due to insane regulations.

Contrary to age & humble appearance, text is an advanced technology that provides all these capabilities absent from images.