Alt Text entry field should be expandable, double line

[markciotola]

In the Media Library, in the metadata entry area (see below image), the Alt Text entry field should be expandable, just as the Caption and Description fields are. This is because the Alt Text field should ideally include sufficient detail that a visually-impaired reader could gain all of the information from the media item (e.g. image) from only the Alt Text contents.

Using WP 4.6

In fact, this field should be at least have two lines to encourage entry of sufficient details.

See WCAG 2 guidelines

​https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#text-equiv

​https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html#uc-text-alternatives-head

[markciotola]

Image of meta data area

[joemcgill]

Hi @markciotola,

Thanks for the suggestion and welcome to Trac. While I support the desire to encourage people to add useful alt text, I don't think turning this field into a multi-line textarea is the right approach. Unlike caption and description, the alt text ends up being used as an attribute value on the img element itself, which doesn't support things like line breaks within the text.

The current input itself supports very long strings of text, so people aren't limited on that front. If anything, we might be able to add some kind of help text to encourage best practices, but changing the field type is probably not the way to go.

I'm going to mark this ticket as closed, maybe-later based on the specific request, but feel free to continue discussion about other ways we might help encourage best practices here.

[sabernhardt]

Duplicate of #50066.

The field was changed to a textarea in r54243.