Alt text for image attachments

[Spydarlee]

One feature that Trix still lacks, last I checked, is the option to add alt text to image attachments. I've attempted to manually patch support in on top of Trix in the past but never managed to get it working nicely.

ActionText doesn't support alt text out of the box either, AFAIK, so maybe that should come first, but it's pretty straightforward to manually support alt text as a custom blob attribute.

This would have some design implications (would users add alt text in a similar way to captions, underneath the image? Or would this need a little pop-up form of sorts?) but alt text is so important for accessibility, I think it would be great if lexxy could offer this!

Any thoughts or existing discussions about this at all? :)

[lylo]

💯 for this. The Pika blog app uses Rhino editor and does it with another button below the attachment delete icon. I thought it was a nice approach:

Clicking it brings up a modal:

[jorgemanrubia]

Thanks for bringing this up @Spydarlee.

Yes, we need to suport ALT text properly in Lexxy, and in Action Text. Action Text attachments already support a caption attribute, I aggree it would be good to support an additional altone.

I would love to hear @brunoprietog thoughts here. Do you think it is good to keep caption and alt as separate attributes? Maybe, if you provide a caption but not an alt text, then we can assimilate the caption as the alt for images?

Regarding how to edit alt texts, I would definitely involve a 37signals designer. But I would like to set the path in Action Text first.

CC @seanpdoyle

[seanpdoyle]

I agree, it is important to figure out how to bake-in support for setting [alt] text.

I'd opened basecamp/trix#1198 as a way to give consumers an opportunity to build their own UI. Is that worth merging ahead of first-party support?

[brunoprietog]

I'm not entirely convinced that we should use the caption as a fallback for the alt attribute. Firstly, because they would be duplicated—I mean, the caption is right there immediately below—but also because when an image doesn't have an alt attribute, some browsers such as Edge or Chrome try to generate descriptions automatically using AI, if you have it enabled, in case the image doesn't have the alt attribute. So yes, I'd definitely go for the separate and independent attributes.

[lylo]

I've love to bump this up the list. Should it be added as an enhancement issue @samuelpecher? I'd be happy to look at a PR but I think the attachment highlighting (delete icon etc) is going to be tackled by 37signals rather than external... so maybe a way to add alt text could be factored into that?

[coatezy]

This is my first quick attempt at adding alt text support. The UI/UX took a bit more thought than I expected, mostly to make sure it slotted in cleanly alongside the existing delete button and caption field.

I made the design decisions and patched Action Text alt text support purely so I could explore the solution properly and hopefully help move things forward 🤞

coatezy#1

I’d be happy to continue exploring this.