Add a little input box after clicking submit when things like alt text are missing? Seems like an easy problem.

A simple one, i believe that softwares must enforce them rather letting users doing it.

Here is some ideas :

• refuse “image post” without alt text.
• when you upload picture, you must provide their alt text, if there is no alt text, the picture will be deleted.
• hide user post based on alt text and remove post score if the alt text is bad.
• deactivate crosspost on posts who don’t have alt text

It maybe harsh but i believe that’s the only way to reach accessibility.

Edit :

• alt text autogen + a reminder bot will help users
• The app fedilab (mastodon) has some good rules on post with alt text.
• collaborative alt text.

These days, it would probably be more effective to make it easy for instance operators hook up a local multi modal llm to the server to auto generate alt text for all images posted on their instance. I’d happily donate to cover the infrastructure costs for any instance owner who was doing that

OCR tool+ to autogen a suggested alt text. The path of least resistance needs to be lowered.

Alternatively, inverting the paradigm is likely to cause less issues and push back. Add the automated tool the the end user in need of the version. This obviously creates the issue of data quality and trust, but for the smaller group. What if there was a reply field silently posted to everyone’s notifications feed indicating anonymous instances of the tool being used to fill in the gaps for alt text? The message would need to be opt out or carefully presented. Perhaps it could be possible to modify the post itself via the tool? Better yet, make the alt text field a Wikipedia style affair anyone with an account can edit, but with a lock available to the OP. That would create much more healthy awareness of the need for alt text, as people posting the content will see the places where gaps are filled by an automated tool. It gives them the chance to edit. This does little to initially improve the experience of the most active alt text users, but it creates a strong cultural shift in awareness that should improve the situation greatly in the long term IMO.

There is already a not-hidden field presented when making a post to fill in alt-text on Lemmy, but I wonder how many users know its purpose. It assumes everyone knows what it is. It would be helpful if it had a short explination next to the input field, with a link to a larger explination and why it should be used.

And for images that are just screenshots of tweets or are otherwise just text, maybe some kind of image to text process can be done automatically to fill the alt-text out. 🤷‍♂️

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