Support alt-text for featured images

[bxie]

Feature Request: Adding alt-text to featured images, avatars

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Featured images and avatar images in Academic theme do not support alt-text, which impacts both SEO and website accessibility. So not only may websites in Academic struggle to win the Google Search game, they will also be inaccessible to visitors who can't see images (low or no vision) or load them (slow or interrupted internet connection)

1282 requested alt-text in featured image. This issue was closed with no activity. This feature request is similar in ask, but applicable to avatar images.

705 made a similar request, but the action taken was hard-coding the alt text of the avatar image to "Avatar" and alt text to other images harded coded to blank. This fix feels narrowly scoped and also a bit hacky :)

Describe the solution you'd like Similar to how featured images can have captions, also have Academic support alt_text which becomes the alt property of the tag. Markdown images already support alt text by default.

Describe alternatives you've considered I could put the content of alt text into the caption property, but that would result in clutter on the screen (because a very verbose caption would appear next to an image and be redundant for sighted people). It would also result in subpar SEO because web crawlers are looking for alt text in particular to interpret an image.

User-defined images can have alt-text support with shortcode or standard markdown, but we can't do this for avatars or featured images.

Additional context Alt text will improve both SEO as well as ensure websites built w/ Academic are accessible to a broader audience.

It's great that we can include captions, and I would also like to see alt text be supported as well! Alt text and captions serve different purposes and having a caption serve as the alt-text can result in poor SEO (web crawlers often rely on alt text to interpret image) and make websites inaccessible to many groups of people! (e.g. those who have low or no vision, people on slow or interrupted internet connections)

Captions tend to assume that somebody can see the image and add specific detail that alone does not describe the image. Alt text is intended to stand in place of the picture and includes more descriptive detail.

For example, here's this familiar image: Caption: George is all about the cat-ception.

The caption alone ("George is all about the cat-ception") does not describe the image. But it did add more detail! The alt-text ("Artistic image of cat wearing large round sunglasses which show the "nyan cat" cartoon flying through space with a rainbow trailing it") is supposed to describe the image for those who can't see it.

More on alt text vs captions and on alt-text and SEO.

Would love to see alt-text be supported in Academic!

[gcushen]

Images in Academic theme do not support alt-text

Images that a user adds to a page in Academic do generally support alt-text. For example, an alt="" parameter can be specified with the figure shortcode or via the standard Markdown image syntax.

Please can you clarify specifically which image(s) you would like to add an alt tag for which don't already have one?

[bxie]

Ah yes good point! I was speaking more specifically to featured images and avatars which do not appear to support user-defined alt text.

(updated issue to be more specific)