Hello!

I've added a new rule to the side bar:

9. When posting an image containing text, provide alt text in the post body. This helps users with limited vision participate in our community. Providing alt text on all image posts is strongly encouraged.

This rule was added as a response to an increase in image posts where the main content is the text in the image with no provided alt text.

A lot of people with limited vision rely on service dogs to function, and it would be really unfortunate to exclude them from this community. This also lets users more easily copy-paste and translate post content.

Alt text is generally a rough description of the content alongside a caption of the text on the image.

EDIT: After further discussion, I believe it is important to encourage alt text across the fediverse even on non-text image posts. I strongly encourage submitters to put a short alt text in the post body when posting images of their pets, and I encourage commenters to generate alt text for posts where the submitter may have forgotten to put one in the body.

Here's a good example of alt text:

Alt: My brown and white Border Collie, sitting on my computer chair looking outside through the window.

https://lemmy.ca/post/71504213

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.