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In my opinion, too many questions and too many answers rely on images and videos. To be accessible to the visually impaired, authors who use images in their questions and answers should write something along the lines of

![One thousand word exposé on what the linked image portrays](http:/link/to/image)

Rant over.

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    $\begingroup$ Note to self: Fix the accessibility problem with this answer and this answer, and most likely, with other answers written by me. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    May 22, 2016 at 16:04
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    $\begingroup$ This is a good point. Image markup does have the ability to insert alt text for images, but I find in a lot of cases that the alt text is not very helpful. This is perhaps an area that we could improve on as a community. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    May 23, 2016 at 14:34
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    $\begingroup$ Videos should be supplementary only. Neither question or answer should rely on video--the information needed for the post should be written in the post. $\endgroup$
    – called2voyage Mod
    May 23, 2016 at 14:35
  • $\begingroup$ @called2voyage I think this is really important. While there's a lot of activity behind the "don't use jet" movement for uniform color maps more friendly to the ~1% who have some kind of color blindness (there is haiku as well, if you look for it), I think many including myself just default to "oh well..." when thinking about the visually impaired reading our stuff. If the SE ecosystem had a resource for this even half as good as the one for mathjax that would be great! $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 24, 2016 at 8:15
  • $\begingroup$ @called2voyage while there is not much more that can be done for questions like this as far as moving information to text, I was able to put everything into text in this question. Of course in the second case, the image is of text anyway :) $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 24, 2016 at 8:47
  • $\begingroup$ @DavidHammen this is a good point - the link to the AFB recommendations Creating Accessible Websites is a good place to start. Those are great answers by the way! I've asked a follow-up question already. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    May 24, 2016 at 9:02
  • $\begingroup$ I attacked my answer on the tidal bulge, and now I have another question: Why the distinction between the alt-text and the caption? Perhaps that should be a meta feature request. $\endgroup$
    – David Hammen
    May 24, 2016 at 14:18
  • $\begingroup$ @DavidHammen thats probably from HTML - alt text is for cases when the image cannot be shown - text browser, file not available, iirc for the screen readers for the visually impaired - and should say what the image represents; title text (which I suppose caption translates to) is for when you hover over the image and it shows "additional" text which you will see together with the image. But browsers make it a bit hard because for historical reasons some may show one in place of the other when only one of them is defined. $\endgroup$
    – jkavalik
    May 25, 2016 at 6:07

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