Lemmy should do it similar to how I have seen this done on Mastodon. When you upload an image an overlay shows up to remind the user to describe the image before submitting. The typical user is not going to remember to do this.
An excellent suggestion! I hope you don't mind, but I went ahead and created a feature request for this just now: lemmy-ui#1759
Hmmm seems like the text doesn't show up on Jerboa
The text isn't supposed to show up. It's alternative text for viewers that can't see the image (or otherwise need it described).
In web browsers, you often can long press the see alt or title text, though. As an aside, title text is kinda similar to alt text, but shows up on hover in desktop (on mobile, it's also long press). It's not meant for accessibility and not usually friendly for it. It's usually for supplementary information and not to describe the image. Eg, an acronym might have title text that defines what the acronym stands for.
This is wonderful advice, it should be in all introduction material.
Very nice, thanks for the write up!
Someone called me out on this yesterday. On a thread about rblind, so deservedly so. I had no idea this is how it works though. Thanks!
That was me, and my bad. As a blind person myself, I’ve never tried to post an image. I knew including alt text was possible, but I didn’t realize the method was undocumented, and Lemmy doesn’t prompt for it. If I had, I would have offered help, not just snark.
No worries! I never really considered blind people browsing apps, I only became aware of the technical details since the API changes at reddit, so it's still far from a reflex to think about.
Thanks for pointing it out though.
I wish you could post gifs this way.
You can though?
Sweet, I can actually read the alt text by long-pressing the image. This opens up a whole new avenue for good caption gags.
It doesn't play for me in jerboa
Connect and Liftoff are better than Jerboa atm, try those
I'm not getting the alt text in Connect, is there an option not enabled by default or something?
I tried liftoff and found it was hard to browse compared to jerboa. At least on dark mode. All the test being white and not visually distinct makes it less comfortable to browse than jerboa.
I'll have to try connect though
description is accurate👍
‼️ Last time I tried it, it wouldn't work for me! Thank you!
This is really interesting and good to know, thank you for sharing. I'm going to try and remember this for all my images going forward.
For posts that are image based does the OP need to describe them or is that covered somehow already by screen readers?
Excellent question. For image-based posts, there is currently no mechanism to directly embed alt-text. This is likely to change in the future, however, so subscribe to lemmy#1086 for updates.
For now, the general advice is to use the post body to describe the linked image (on Lemmy, all posts are allowed to have "self-post"-like text). This would work by linking the image directly as usual and also embedding the same image in the post text with alt-text included there.
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Great YSK! Definitely doing this from now!
Is there a way to embed the actual image itself and not have to rely on a third party like Imgur?
You can click the little image button when commenting or posting, but it uploads it to the instance you're on, which costs them space, so it's probably limited in most instances
And then is there a way to add alt text to that uploaded image?
Yes, when I tried it just now it uploaded the picture and put the same text into the comment that you need to link external images  it just had a link for the newly uploaded photo.
Thank you. I'll start doing this from now on!
Question for Jerboa users: how do you zoom in on one of these comment images? They're frequently too small to read.
I'm guessing it is in settings? Also a jerboa user. But I am seeing the comment images at a reasonable size. I'm using the dark theme, and I think I changed the font size, but it's been almost a month since I first installed, so not super sure.
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