Supporting image captions - in addition to alt text

Continuing the discussion from How to add a description for uploaded images?:

I came looking for a way to add a caption—visible to all—to an image. (<figcaption>)

alt vs. caption

I love that Discourse supports alt text for sight-impaired readers, but they’re effectively unavailable to sighted readers. Sighted readers don’t neccessarily need the same full image description, but would often be served by a bit of context, e.g. What movie is that screenshot from? What’s the title of that artwork?

The search was complicated a bit by the fact that “caption” is often used here when discussing image alt text. Even the Discourse AI feature is called “Caption with AI.” This point is made in a discussion of the manual “captioning” (alt text) method.

syntax

The parent thread ends in 2019 with:

I found some old relevant topics at CommonMark noting that:

But https://talk.commonmark.org/ is currently bannered with “Please note the CommonMark spec is currently frozen with respect to features” and the image spec doesn’t appear to address the use of captions.

next

Would it be so bad to diverge from CommonMark in this case and implement something in Discourse to support the common <figcaption> tag for images?