[Feat] - Suggest image descriptions (alt text) in case they are missing

[OddDev]

Pitch

For posts that feature media without a11y relevant descriptions add a button to "suggest alt text". One can add a suitable description for the author to approve.

Motivation

People that are not able to fully visually comprehend an image rely on image descriptions. Often they are not added.

People choose to either scold the author in the replies or add a image descriptions as an answer.
It would make this process much easier to have a dedicated feature for that.

It would help to emphasize the importance of image descriptions, people that want to write them for others, and of course people that rely on them.

[RockstarRaccoon]

Seconded. It gets really awkward to remind people of this in actual replies, because it feels a bit rude to be like, "Hey you forgot the caption!"

[rkingett]

I'd really love this to happen as well! The Alt4Me hashtag doesn't carry to all instances, and I'd love something to be built to suggest media descriptions. This way, users that would love to provide them can do so without making the OP feel bad. This would also work far better than groups.

[Taywee]

Another benefit of a dedicated feature is that alt text often has higher character limits than the posts themselves. mastodon.art, for example, has a limit of 500 characters on posts, but 1500 for alt text. A dedicated feature would be able to respect the appropriate character limit.

[SteffoSpieler]

This would be a great feature, but I think the OP of a post should get a message like "xyz suggested an alt text, do you want to apply it?" first, so trolls can't do a lot of harm by writing bad stuff into the alt texts.
Also this warning should obviously not appear if it's from someone who OP has blocked or similar.

[OddDev]

This would be a great feature, but I think the OP of a post should get a message like "xyz suggested an alt text, do you want to apply it?" first, so trolls can't do a lot of harm by writing bad stuff into the alt texts.
Also this warning should obviously not appear if it's from someone who OP has blocked or similar.

That's what I was suggesting 😅

One can add a suitable description for the author to approve.

[SteffoSpieler]

That's what I was suggesting 😅

oh whoops, then I've missed that. Sorry 😅

[nclm]

Oops I had posted almost the same over at #27320. Closing it and pasting here some of the initial text... Probably not that different from what has been said already, but just in case the details differ:

• When a post does not have alt text, a “no alt / propose alt” badge/button would be displayed. Clicking it would go to the next step. If a post already have alt text, clicking the “alt” badge would open a modal with the alt text nicely readable, along with a “suggest an edit” button which also goes to the next step. Meaning that readers of the post, not only the original poster, have an easy way to write alt text for any images that they come across.
• When someone clicks, it open a new write alt text modal. This can be just based on the modal used when editing your own alt text for an image you post. If there was no alt text on the image, it would be an empty field, if there was already alt text, it would be prefilled with the original.
• Once written/edited, you can click “Submit/Propose”
• The original poster would get a notification (of a new type), “New alt text proposal for this media”, with a simple “Accept” button (and maybe “Edit” too).
• Once accepted, the original post would be automatically edited and republished, with the new alt text inserted. The alt text writer could also be credited in the UI when clicking on the “alt” badge

In the back-end, alt text proposals doesn’t have to be anything else than normal replies, maybe with a special tag or starting with “Alt text:” (meaning compatibility with final fallback for any other Fediverse software or clients). But it would make suggesting alt texts simpler and more integrated as an expected interaction when alt text is missing/poor.