Interesting. Thanks! (I usually copy-pasta images in the wysiwyg, so it hadn’t occurred to me to muck with the upload button).
That said, I’m also LAZY, so I’m unlikely to add the extra steps. As I suspect most are. Hence, my desire for a default / native solution.
An accessibility solution which relies on people typing everything isn’t an accessibility solution.
See also: using gif-warning tags on Tumblr. It breaks down because it requires users posting/reposting the images to tag everything, when some users have trouble typing the tags, and some other users don’t bother typing the tags, and also because it requires users who are receiving the images to install extra software such as tumblr savior, when some of us can’t get tumblr savior to work.
It turns out that some screen readers require pages to have “proper headers,” “proper layout,” and “proper tables,” instead of the minimalist underline headers, use plain text in layout, and use plain text with tabs in tables approach that I prefer. I am sick of “proper layouts” screwing with my text, and screwing with any outline, or any rules organization in my text, and I am sick of “proper headers,” “proper layout,” and “proper tables,” getting properly corrupted when switching between word processors. I don’t know what to do about that.
nice gif!
I’m afraid I don’t know who is due the credit; but I am not. In fact, that was my test GIF precisely because I also thought “nice gif!” while browsing the interwebs at some point in the recent past, so it was among the most accessible ones on my computer.
Maybe TinEye knows…
Amen to that. If it requires user intervention, that’s a nice way of saying that it mostly won’t happen.
That said, what sort of automation do you think would be most helpful(within the limits of what can be achieved)?
Speaking as one who isn’t responsible for doing it(@codinghorror can feel free to smack me or correct me if he deems it justified), I’d imagine that simply automatically adding a generic alt string to images without one would be quite trivial. For the WYSIWYG editor to work in the first place, Discourse can clearly rewrite “user pasted an image” into a proper img tag, and handle uploading the image to some web-facing location in the background, so writing an alt string would represent a very minimal extension.
However, if you wanted more than a generic alt message “Somebody posted a picture here and didn’t provide alt text; that asshole”, things get more complex: would reporting the original filename be helpful?(reporting the original path on the client would be a dangerous information leak). Saying anything useful about what the image is would be a nasty machine vision problem(especially given the fondness for optical illusion and glitch GIFs). If the image has EXIF data, should those be used, or is that a potential data leak and an open invitation to sneak GNAA ascii ‘art’ into innocuous-looking images?
What would your preferred implementation look like? Add an EXIF-like string storage field to GIFs(or other image formats) to store a ‘default’ alt text for when none is otherwise provided? Have CMSes and bulletin board systems sub in a default alt text? I agree that relying on users is hopeless; but, until machine vision improves, there is no other source of actually good alt text, since image recognition and natural language description of images is a brutally hairy problem.
I put the gif between spoiler tags to blur it, which seemed like a good way to reduce the problem from my side without being able to control the autoplay feature.
In that case, I’m not really clear what the problem is. I can agree with you that click to play should be standard on forums like this one, but if you’re already doing it from your end, why would it be a problem that gifs autoplay for other people? I use adblock on my browser, which eliminates a lot of the annoyances for me; gifs are fine for me, but flash adverts and autoplayed audio aren’t. I don’t really care if websites, advertisers or other users post elements that don’t get past my filter. Or is it that a gif is often used to comment on something, so the comment is more difficult to interpret without the gif? As with phones, I’d like to see more accessibility and options for those who don’t want them, but they also serve a purpose for those who do. If your add-on solves the problem for you, what else needs to be changed?
This is what I see:
Is there an image behind the text? I get an arrow cursor when I hover over it, but I can’t click on it. It does seem to mess with the screen though, I get a white box that flashes up in different areas.
No, I’m afraid my attempt to talk about HTML tags was interpreted as HTML by Discourse. My mistake, nothing to see there.
Incidentally, is there a “code/interpret this completely literally and print it as a I wrote it” setting that anyone knows of?
Could it be the "preformatted text" </> button between Quote and Upload? Let's see. [spoiler] Can I see this? [/spoiler] <strike> Is this stricken out? </strike> Hmm. ;) Seems to work.
Don’t know if it works for all tags, but maybe that’s what it’s designed to do. I am only an egg. 
This is really the way it should be. Browsers should support a click to animate setting for GIFs for accessibility.
Anyway, as of today, that’s not the case… but I’ve already linked to plugins that do this.
IE — already works, hit esc to stop all animation. Well done IE! You’re the bestestest!
Firefox — SuperStop – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)
Chrome — https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gif-jam-animation-stopper/bclnijbemellankmoaafepibbboobalb
Or use Lynx.
Does that still exist?
Wow. I think my eyes just broke. When was the last time somebody said that about Internet Explorer?
That is not dead which can eternal lie…
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