memes

OH, is THAT what that is!?

First to respond to your point, no, I meant like trigger warnings or something so that if someone did not want to see something then they could nope out. Even if they were voluntary, we could choose to use them, except right now they don't really exist (here I am talking about the OP, like people would see the graphic first & foremost, whereas any associated text is optional - like on the webpage you see that by clicking the plus sign, when viewed from outside of the individual page for the post).

About the text labels: I had no idea what was supposed to go inside the []'s. I just saw the sourcecode button, and looked at someone else showing a picture, then followed suit. None of this is explained anywhere that I have seen so far - like it is not at https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/index.html, or https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/02-media.html (which itself is somewhat hard to access - e.g. if you start typing, then click it to learn, it will abandon all the text you previously entered; and yet while it is a link, none of the other buttons like B for bold are links, nor is there any visual indicator that the help one is a link that is capable of being opened in another tab by the right-click menu, at least in my dark compact mode), or the latter links to https://commonmark.org/help/tutorial/08-images.html but after navigating to the appropriate section it seems that it does not appear there either, and again, other people do not seem to use it so I had no idea. Worst of all is that I see no difference at all in my browser when I put something there vs. not - like I would expect the "alternative text" to show up as a tooltip when hovering over the image? Or... something? But, at least in the preview mode, it does not. I will look at the test scenario below after actually posting this reply and see if that somehow makes a difference, but so far in any browser I've tried it does not seem to.

Anyway, both issues are explained by the fact that Lemmy is still alpha-version software, 0.19.3 on my instance, and lacks that level of "polish" yet.

Edit: update - nope, not Chrome, Firefox, or Safari all from my Mac. I inspected the HTML source and it does indeed put alt="Test", but a little internet surfing seems to suggest that the "alt" text is not widely supported across all browsers - e.g. they could choose to override it and just put their own (like "?") instead, or it could be rendered so small that unless you override the img height and width that you'll never see it, etc.

I thank you for bringing this to my attention but unless you have any suggestions for how to make my messages on Lemmy more "accessible", I am not sure what else to do - I mean that I am not a contributor to the Lemmy sourcecode. In the case of an image that refuses to display, leaving it blank at least doesn't clutter up the display with weird text, and I would guess that it would be obvious by the broken-image sign that most common browsers choose to insert whenever that happen? e.g.:

Which in my Chrome renders as:

Edit 2: Likewise in Safari as well, although it appears that Firefox has once again decided to strike out on their own. Even when you have browser.display.show_image_placeholders set to "true", according to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1016612 :

You normally only see placeholders for images when there are dimensions (width and height) specified in the page code, so Firefox know what space to reserve. If the natural dimensions of the image are to be used and nothing is specified then you won't see the placeholder. This may also depend on the DOCTYPE of the web page.

As always there are work-around solutions (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1694937/firefox-show-broken-images), chiefly by "forcing" a specified height and width for all images by default, although that sounds dangerous to me like it would be more likely to break many pages even if it would solve the current issue.

In short, this is yet one more way that Firefox needs to step up its game.:-( I perpetually feel roughly one year away from just abandoning it altogether and finding an open-source solution, but I haven't investigated yet what that might be (LibreWolf maybe?).