Allow entry of alt-text for collection and community logos / thumbnails

[dspace-bot]

Imported from JIRA [DS-4206] created by gss1

For better ADA accessibility compliance - it would be great to be able to enter alt-text for collection and community logos or thumbnail images.

[tdonohue]

Rediscovered this ticket today when looking to see if this issue was documented. It still exists in DSpace 7.

While thumbnails and logos do have alt-text, it's generic & hardcoded. I agree it'd be much better to make this configurable, perhaps by using the "description" field on the Bitstream object (which already is editable to Administrators).

Flagging this as a bug & pulling it over to our maintenance board in search of a volunteer.

[DanGastardelli]

Good afternoon,
I am Daniel Pais and I work for Neki-It. I would like to require this activity for us beacause we are already working on it.

[tdonohue]

@DanGastardelli : Assigning this to you for the Neki-It team to work on. Apologies for the late response, but your request came in during the holidays.

[tdonohue]

Semi-related to this ticket: Someone asked me today if I knew of any tools to automatically generate Alt text for images using artificial intelligence (AI) to avoid having to have manual data entry. I stumbled on https://alttext.ai/ (and some other similar tools) which have APIs to do this exact thing.

Unfortunately though, these tools are not free. But, I wanted to mention this here as a general brainstorm. If such a free tool existed, it could be nice to automatically generate some "reasonable" alt text for these logos/thumbnails so that DSpace users only need to review/correct it. That tool doesn't appear to exist yet though (at least not a free one that anyone can use), so it's not a requirement for this particular ticket. Just a brainstorm for the future.

[DanGastardelli]

Good morning!

I made the change that allows the use of the thumbnail description as the description of thumbnails in items and created a new field in the edit and create communities and collections form for the thumbnail description in this pull request "https://github.com/ /pull/2783". However, to create this field when creating and editing communities and collections, it was necessary to create the "dc.description.thumbnail" metadata and for the implementation to work correctly it is necessary to insert this metadata into the database.

In this next period from 01/31/2024 to 02/09/2024 I will be on vacation, would it be possible to include my teammate "https://github.com/IgorBaptist4" as also responsible for this call?

Thank you and I look forward to your feedback!

[tdonohue]

@DanGastardelli : You are welcome to delegate follow-up work to whomever you want. However, GitHub will only allow me to add new assignees if they comment on the issue or PR. So @IgorBaptist4 will need to add a comment here.

We currently have a very large number of PRs in our queue to review. I don't know if your PR #2783 will be reviewed prior to Feb 9, but we'll see. Either way, that PR will be considered for 8.0, but there's a lot of other PRs ahead of it in line.

One minor recommendation. I don't think we should create a new dc.description.thumbnail field. I'll add a brief description why on the PR itself as an early review.

[DanGastardelli]

@tdonohue the metadata responsible for storing the thumbnail description in communities and collections was modified from "dc.description.thumbnail" to "dspace.thumbnail.description" as you suggested, thus not using invalid dublin core metadata. The PR on the backend with the new metadata is DSpace/DSpace#9550 and the PR on the frontend is #3018, both for the main branch.

I look forward to your feedback!

[DanGastardelli]

@tdonohue, the corrections were made and can be found in the PR's DSpace/DSpace#9562 and #3026; being made based on main and main properly updated. A small adjustment was also made to a conditional indicated as an error by running the "yarn lint --fix" command, as instructed.

Waiting feedback!