How does one add image descriptions?

Rob T Firefly@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 24 points –

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!

5

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.

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.