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!
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.
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
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