Chapotraphouse

I have tried to write alt text for images but am discouraged by a) how difficult it is to adequately convey the point of an image, and b) then knowing few if any people will see it.

Things that make alt text more likely to happen:

• Alt text should be visible to everyone. Maybe it could go over-top of the blurred images. Or something.
• When you add an image via the toolbar button or paste into edit box, it should have placeholder alt text like "Image description here"; but that placeholder should get stripped out if it is not edited by the user, to avoid meaningless default alt
• the markdown Help page that you can get by pressing the (?) button on the far right of the editing toolbar (in default web layout) should describe the use of alt text
• images that are grabbed automatically when posting a URL should include alt text if available. For example this recent post contains a banner image, pulled from the original page. On hexbear, the proxied image has no alt, but on the original page, if you right-click and use "Inspect" you see alt="A row of teenagers all using their phones."

Images are a terrible medium for online communication

that's a silly thing to say. even the alt text you provided for your own screenshot is way less good at conveying the intended message than the screenshot itself. By looking at the image I can instantly know how to add alt text when uploading an image as a post. But reading the alt text gives a hint, at best.

I've tried before to find guides about how to write alt text but never found anything that suits this kind of environment. It's straight forward if you are talking about interface elements etc but hardly a trivial request when it comes to creative stuff, jokes, or images where inferences are supposed to be made.