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00:01
@ibid "leave it blank" being operative. You can do that if you feel it is appropriate. Don't just leave the placeholder text and complain when someone else tries to fix it.
At least they're attempting to make the assistive experience better, which is more than can be said for your rollback.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of images on the website have the placeholder text.
As long as the placeholder is there it just indicates that no effort has yet been made.
Purposely inserting alt text which doesn't improve the experience or match guidelines turns that from neutral to incorrect.
I basically see it as if there's an additional point I could have added to my answer but never did, and then someone comes along and adds the point but in a way that's completely incorrect. I'd prefer to remain in the orginal neutral state then to have incorrect info specifically added in.
Maybe the point would have improved the answer if made correctly. And if it was and I rolled it back I'd be unimproving the answer. But it wasn't.
@DavidW I just tested it on a post that had [![]][1]. It said "TWOELLJAYPEEGEEDOTPEEENGEE link" which is the end of the url for 1 in that post. It was very confusing for me to hear, since I have my screen reader set to be pretty fast
Here too, I'd much prefer a placeholder alt-text that is wrong than a non-placeholder alt-text that is wrong.
00:20
You're asserting that the new alt text was wrong but I'm not sure why you think that at all
Because the style guides I looked at were pretty clear that alt text shouldn't repeat info that's already on the page
I spent a bit of time looking it up to be sure prior to the rollback
Alt-text is to ensure a cohesive experience. It isn't an "every image just have alt text" thing.
And when the alt text is repeating info, it's a less cohesive experience.
But "enter image description here" is worse. It's longer and it only tells the user that there's something there that nobody's telling them about
3
Yes, but it's also the default
It represents that you didn't do anything
Not that you did the wrong thing
It could be a picture of anything
Not when the context and caption make it clear what it is.
Show me an alt text guide that says to write "see caption" for the alt-text of images already captioned.
00:29
That's not how most posts are written. I frequently find the default alt text used even when there are no other contents in the post. Someone who really wants to see what's in the image might decide to spend a lot of unnecessary time trying to figure out what's in the mystery image only to find out that the image was purely decorative
@Laurel Oh, that's good to know. Thanks for testing. I don't currently have a reader set up on this device since it's a few years since I've done work on making sites accessible.
@Laurel My answer isn't like that though. If this was the case here I wouldn't have rolled it back.
My answer provided clear context and a caption to the image
@ibid Those guides are written for people creating sites where they have the control to completely hide things. I think we've demonstrated that the options are "image description follows," (or the equivalent) "enter image description here," or "pee ex dee dee cee dot jay pee gee," and only one of those is at all friendly.
@Laurel Especially since SE copies all uploaded images to imgur and even the (potentially meaningful) original file name or URL are lost.
All of those are equally incorrect, but "enter image description here" is the only one of them doesn't demonstrate intentionally being incorrect.
The correct alt-text would be to leave it blank.
@ibid That is simply wrong.
00:35
How so?
I think we can all agree the vast vast majority of images on the site have the default.
@ibid Laurel just tested empty alt text, and the construct that SE uses for image causes the reader to spell out the file name.
Oh, I wasn't following that chain
Hmm
What about white space?
" "
@ibid No, I don't think we can. Certainly I've uploaded several hundred images and they all had useful alt text. There are a lot of other fairly active users here who habitually do the same.
Also this seems like an issue with SE, not with alt-text guidance
@DavidW could probably check this with a data se query
There are approximately 10k images with the default alt text.
I don't know if anyone's done a query for the full number of images on the site.
(And that's images, not posts, so if a post has multiple images it gets counted multiple times.)
There are over 22k posts with images in them, so I'd have to say that the majority (though perhaps not a large majority) of images have alt text set.
00:43
Interesting
(Plus the former query will capture images not hosted on imgur, but my quick check was only for imgur links.)
@DavidW I'm using voiceover on iOS, which just comes preinstalled on every iPhone, etc. It works a little differently (swiping and turning vs using a keyboard) but it's really handy
Are you including links to images not formatted as images?
Because not every imgur link is an image
And so many of them will have neither the default alt text nor any other alt text
@ibid Screen readers don't pronounce white space. I'm not sure what it would say exactly without testing it, but there's no way it would be a proper description for the link (which leads to a full page version of the image). If you want to have no alt text, your image can't be a link
It's a bit of a problem that the default tools link all images.
It should only do that if it needs to downsample them, or if someone's actually providing a remote source.
00:52
I often do them as links to the full image as a bit of a hack to be able to include the full thing without it obstructing too much space in the answer.
I don't think the full size version is particularly needed though
It's more of a why not
The link isn't actually important to the answer
But like I guess that I hope that if someone does want to inspect something in the image and tries interacting with it they'll notice the link.
The click through version isn't the one meant to be read with the answer.
For sure; I almost always upload the best quality image I can find and then use the "m" version for the inline copy, leaving the full image at the link.
01:08
@Laurel semantically is alt text on a image that is also a link a description of the image or of the link?
01:28
@ibid It says "image link" at the end of the alt text so it's kinda both
At least in markdown
We don't really have any other way to do it other than what I've described
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04:37
@ibid No; leaving it as the default leaves no indication of what the image is for anyone relying on the alt text. A short indicator that the information can be found in the text is objectively more accessible. If it was implemented in a different way, I'd agree that leaving it blank would be better, but it looks like Laurel just proved that leaving it blank isn't a good idea either.
Your argument relies on a hypothetical implementation of a screen reader or whatnot instead of taking into account reality.
@ibid There are 38526 images on the site accoridng to SEDE. 19186 of those have "enter image description here", while another 723 are blank. That means that a slight minority has custom alt text. (Query link.)
04:59
@Mithical 19k!? I thought you'd said there were under 11k!
Under 11k posts. 19k distinct images.
There are 128.5k on SO, for scale...
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10:20
@ibid especially because SE's built-in quick search doesn't search in the image alt texts.
anyway, I agree with most of what ibid says about the alt texts
I mean I mostly agree with the part about how the alt texts should be used ideally, not necessarily about whether reverting to the default placeholder is good or bad, I don't care about that latter part. And I agree that my posts with images aren't always the best example to follow.
@DavidW no, you're still allowed to embed external images from any host to the posts, they aren't automatically copied to imgur. (I might not load them, but that's a different matter)
@b_jonas I still don't understand why people are arguing that the alt text I added isn't a good use of alt text, given the limitations of the system.
@ibid The point here is that if the image has a link then it probably shouldn't have an empty or mostly empty alt text, for the same reason as you don't want to have a link with mostly empty text without images, so that readers can see that there's a link. This might still applies when the link is to a higher resolution version of the image, as I sometimes post, so that people can tell that there's a higher resolution version they can access. But
if it's just a link to the same image with the same quality then there's no point for a link in first place, despite that the SE editor UI inserts one by default.
@Mithical I don't really have an opinion about that revert thing, where an editor changes one useless alt text with another useless alt text. I don't care which one stays really.
10:36
That's classifying it as useless. I don't understand why you'd say it's useless.
10:52
@DavidW I sometimes upload a lower resolution and link to the source of the high resolution one, or upload both a low resolution and a high resolution separately if that's not possible (eg. the high res is a screencap that I made). But then sometimes I only have a low resolution version.
@Mithical Ok, in scifi.stackexchange.com/revisions/143892/4 the alt text says "transcription below" which is not quite useless but somewhat confusing. Probably shouldn't be reverted to "enter image description here" but the revert doesn't make it much worse so I don't think that's an important enough issue for me.
11:16
11 hours ago, by Laurel
But "enter image description here" is worse. It's longer and it only tells the user that there's something there that nobody's telling them about
@Mithical that doesn't apply here: "enter image description here" tells that there's an image, whereas "transcription below" sounds like you don't have an image, only a transcription
11:50
also now I composed a data.stackexchange.com query to find my own image alt texts, because I think some of them are similarly bad data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/edit/1716423
12:46
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posted on March 02, 2023 by tech

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22:08
What do you know? I've found a new way to spell Wookieepedia.
 
1 hour later…
23:19
@DavidW looks like an attempted British spelling
23:31
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23:47
@Mithical I agree, though it was only spelled that way in one of the two usages in the post. FWIW, I will still occasionally write "encyclopaedia" (just like "aesthetic" and "mediaeval"), just not, you know, in names that aren't spelled that way. :)

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