Hi, all! I’m posting to Lemmy from desktop, and I’m having trouble finding where one adds an image description (commonly known as a “caption” or “alt text”) for accessibility when making an image post.

Help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

  • moreeni@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    2 years ago

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1086 check this thread out. The TL;DR is in this comment from the developer:

    For posts, I can’t do alt text for those, because there’s no guarantee the links are, or have, images. Links could go to articles, videos, anything. The only option there would be to add a second field, like link_description, which I don’t really want to do. So I think for image posts, just taking the title, and communities asking to transcribe image posts in a comment is the best thing for now.

    As far as images in comments, its all markdown, so ![alt-text](link) works.

    • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      That’s a very disappointing comment from the developer, but thank you for the information. I guess that’s just not something I’ll be doing with Lemmy.

      Directing users to just have a description in the comments or whatever is not a good accessibility solution. I hope the powers that be reconsider and choose to address this.

      EDIT: Much later, I’m happy to note that they did end up adding alt text functionality to Lemmy v0.19.4 in June 2024, and all Lemmy users should now have an alt text field available in the posting form provided their instance’s software isn’t hideously out-of-date.