The internet has become 3 massive multi-user blogs, each largely consisting of screenshots taken of the other two. This kind of blows, and not just for the usual reasons that may spring to mind.
Images are a terrible medium for online communication! Not everyone online uses a monitor. Any messages contained in a picture is straight up unacceptable without alt-text. It also makes it harder to find and fact check sources, or to spread a thought or idea further than yet another image upload. Copy/pasting text is just plain easier than downloading and uploading.
If you're going through the trouble of creating an image post, take an extra minuite to copy/past (or even transcribe) the source text into the alt-text submission. It's not much, but it goes a ways to improving how we use this blasted network!
https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-write-an-image-description-2f30d3bf5546
I keep forgetting to set the actual alt-text, so I appreciate the reminder—I'll try to do better going forward. I always try to provide an image description inside a spoiler tag in the post/comment (example). This blog post (shared by @Edie@hexbear.net previously as well as in this thread) actually says
The secondary benefit of this approach is that it also allows for copy-pasting so that people can easily quote/re-share the content of a text post.
One thing I'm unsure about is how accessible spoiler tags are. Is it straightforward for someone using a screenreader to identify that the spoiler tag is there and expand it? I use spoiler tags just to take up less space, but if it's an accessibility issue I'd much rather people have to scroll a bit more if the spoiler tag is a significant complication for the people who need the description the most.