Right now there is a bit left to be desired when it comes to lemmys accessibility features, but it’s a good idea to be mindful of the fact the fediverse and its platforms tends to have pretty universal accessibility features that will likely come to lemmy sooner rather than later
I tried writing alt text with the image on this post on August 9, and I thought it wasn’t working. On mine and other Kbin instances, alt text does load but Firefox just doesn’t show it when I mouseover. In the page’s source, it’s an “alt” argument instead of a “title” argument, and Firefox users can’t see alt text if the image loads successfully. It would work better if Kbin allowed users to input title text instead of alt text.
I didn’t notice until just now, but that post’s alt text works perfectly on Mastodon! It simply duplicates the alt text into the title text and I can read it when I mouseover the image.
That leaves Lemmy which seems to have no alt text support at all. I’ve inspected the page and my alt text simply doesn’t federate to Lemmy. But Lemmy apparently has working spoiler tags and Lemmy users are considering using that to describe images. The Lemmy spoiler tags don’t work anywhere else, though.
Lemmy spoiler tag test
Everywhere but Lemmy will just render this as regular text. My Wordle-playing friends would be sad.
Technically inserting the ALT text into the alt attribute is exactly right. Screen readers will treat it correctly and browsers are free to render it if necessary. This is more a Firefox issue than a Lwmmy issue, in my opinion.
Maybe frontends should add the ALT text to te title attribute for good measure, but that’s often cut off and may confuse screen readers.