Automatically add a relevant alt image attribute

Hello dears.

When a user upload an image to a new topic/post, the image has the alt attribute as ‘image’ (default for all images).

Like in this example:

image

Here, to demonstrate my suggestion, i have changed alt name, so when user click it gets a “relevant” information.

image

or

image

Alt text for images is very important for SEO and is a key contributing search engine ranking factor

What happens is, in my webforum, with thousands of posts, almost all image has its alt name as ‘image’.

So, my suggestion:

If alt attribute is deafult (‘image’) change it to a relevant name (for example, and suggestion, the name of the topic + # of post).

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Nope. Alt is kind of more important to give users a bit better chances when searching images, but filename is the important one, but the most important thing is to use right context, ”this an apple: <image of apple named apple.jpg, alt is apple>.

For SEO of a site alt is totally meaningless.

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Alt text is very useful for those using screenreaders - including people who are blind or partially sighted. But ideally it is text which describes what is being shown. It’s an accessibility issue. (I can’t think of a simple way to do that annotation - one of the image-oriented software services might do it.)

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Yes, this has popped up before. To me the accessibility argument is far more important than the SEO one.

When you dump an image in a post and give it no description, blind people reading the forum are at a great disadvantage. They lose extremely important context.

AI can help bit here and provide automatic titles. I would say it performs okish, but has plenty of gaps.

As an opening move I recommend creating a theme component .

force users to provide titles on images

When enabled and you post anything and forget to enter a title for your images we could prompt you with a intermediary bootbox that reminds you to add titles to your images.

2 Likes

AI provided image alt text is on our backlog for the AI team, by the way.

2 Likes

Of course it is. Well, more or less the argument is anything else than SEO.

I have two blind friends. Both are saying same all the time: the issue is not alt itself, but lack of quality alt-text, plus using alt everywhere all the time on images without any content — and here I see really big issues when webmasters get AI that starts generate alt-texts.

And… the main issue for screen readers is bad design of platform, and there the team has done quite good job.