Editing image alternative (alt) text

To better support our friends on screen readers, and help with indexing on search engines, we’ve introduced the ability to edit your image’s alt text in the preview. We hope this feature can make it easier to update our image descriptions!

Video demonstrating annotation process in composer

To enter a description you can press the pencil icon at the bottom of an image and enter a description. This saves time cause you no longer need to edit the markdown directly.

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I have two questions.

  1. Is this any different from manually removing the alt text manually?
  2. Is it possibly to completely remove the alt text through edit box in the preview? Will it just spit out an error?

Otherwise, this will be very convenient for me. :grinning:

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I assume you mean removing the alt text from the composer: no, there is no difference. Some users get intimidated by modifying the markdown directly, especially when filenames may become cryptic, so this is a good alternative.

We’ve not added any validation to ensure alt texts are always present. So no errors yet :slight_smile:

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Okay, thank you for clarifying.

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I just tried it! Worked great! Thank you.

I continue to advocate for a pop-up option (like the add link interface) that appears whenever someone adds an image (can be a setting that’s turned on or off). Hoping that’s in the plans :crossed_fingers:

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