How do I insert “alt text” (alternate text HTML) on my image uploads onto Forum Topics and Posts I publish, for accessibility compliance and web crawler search visibility?
I am still new to this type of Forum platform
(been over a decade since I touched any Forums, but I am back-ish now).
• Background:
I come from a background where it is expected to do Alt Txt when a platform provides a way (like X app does now)
I was upset I didn’t see a way through the Forum UI so I assumed maybe it wasn’t possible
However, two different nit picky postered commented about my constant reliance upon images one with a valid reason informing me that some people get these Forum updates via Email and some for privacy reasons block Images which means they don’t SEE my images and have zero context without an Alt Text description of said image; and personally an argument can be made that maybe not everyone has current up to date screen readers IMHO thus would also be left out just like the privacy centric email Forum participants.
For these reasons I would like an answer.
Another person keeps mentioning it but gives no reason (let alone any answer to solve it), so I think they are just picking on me.
My reason for relying on images so heavily is I too struggle with various disabilities, including being very visual oriented. That is why I complain about CLI and prefer GUI solutions. It also helps when providing directions for my type of disability when walking through GUI steps to show images but none have done so thus far which is fine but if people are going to complain about me being accommodating to serve people who need images by telling me how much they hate images in this Forum then they need to realize there is an entire spectrum of accessibility to accommodate. Being purely text base hurts people like me, please also consider this before complaining about my heavy reliance on using images to convey what I am attempting to convey.
Which again, is why I am asking for directions on how to begin complying by inserting Alt Text into my image uploads.
This forum use “Discourse” which has 3 formatting options:
See: https://meta.discourse.org/t/supported-formatting-in-posts-markdown-bbcode-and-html/239348 for more information’s.
I personnaly use Markdown. Markdown has diferent implementations and the one used by Discourse is Markdown-it, see the Markdown-it reference. In this demo, check the code of the Minion image and the corresponding ouputs.
So to add an alt attribute, use this:
The format is:
But, according from what i’ve read from your previous posts, the alt attribute won’t be sufficient. I believe it’s supposed to be a small text description with meaningful information. So you have two other solutions:
alt attribute emptyalt empty and add a textual description in your post.To give you a concret example, in your post https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/gui-guide-i-hate-24-hour-clock-time/24743, this is what I would do:
alt corresponding to the date and time in the first image : Thu 29 Feb, 00:05Awesome!
Thank you so much
update
I will come back to try to learn this when I am not half awake …