Anyways, your main concern is that adding an alt text entry would clutter up the UI. Would using the message portion of the message for alt text not do this very thing to the message stream? We have UI metadata for this very purpose, HTML UIs especially have it exceptionally easy to add alt text, the appropriate and contextual place for alt text, in association with the image, where it isn’t in your face but can be revealed by mouse over or a screen reader. Not wanting to use that seems absurd to me.
(deleted message was a draft of this reply that I accidentally hit ctrl+enter on)
A conversational group with only one or maybe two vision-impaired people is a normal usecase. In this social situation, asking everyone to refrain from using visual media seems a bit unreasonable, and it is not a request I’ve ever heard made. But a description of a visual thing is a reasonable and common ask, and giving one is normal.
But if the same image is used repeatedly, manually describing it over and over is an unreasonable ask, because that sort of tedious repetitive uncreative task should be done by software. Even just displaying the filename in the screenreader would allow a human to know that it’s that excited-Pikachu meme again.
Currently, when I attach a malformed picture in DeltaTouch, the preview is blank, but once send I get an error and the filename. Both malformed and well-formed pictures have the filename in the “Message info” popup, obtainable in the swipe-right menu. I hope also putting it in the HTML for the screenreader to read is not too hard.
In-file alt text seems like a great idea. I’m not convinced that “practically no-one else uses it” is a good reason to avoid it. After all, the same argument could be made for Autocrypt.
Explicit UI suggestion: When I upload an image, the preview could include an alttext preview, with the filename as fallback. An edit icon could open a popup to edit the alttext, or I could ignore alttexts and just hit “send“.
I’d appreciate being able to save an edited alttext into my image file metadata from DC, if this isn’t too complex to implement.
To really aggressively keep the interface uncluttered, the preview and its edit icon could go into a CSS hover caption overlay, displayed only on image mouseover. Not sure this is worth the trouble, though.
edit icon could open a popup to edit the alttext, or I could ignore alttexts and just hit “send“.