Made ALT and TITLE field mandatory when uploading media

[slabbe]

Make a config option to force user to fill the ALT and TITLE fields when they upload a media in WP. The option should be enabled or disabled by the admin of the site in the settings panel.

[afercia]

Worth noting that in many cases images are purely decorative and the most appropriate value for the alt text would be leaving it empty alt="". For some background about previous changes to the alt attribute handling, see #34635.

[slabbe]

We asking that as we need to ensure we are WCAG AA compliant. Many of our users are not so tech and skip that step in our publishing workflow. I tought it should be a great feature for our user who use WP and need to keep accessibility at a mandatory level. Adding it directly in the core and let the administrator enable or disable this feature via wp-config.php or directly in the Settings option of the backend could be a nice asset.

[afercia]

@slabbe if filling up the alt attribute field would be mandatory, then users would be forced to always enter a value also for purely decorative images. That would create an accessibility barrier, adding meaningless information and noise for assistive technologies users. Actually, to be WCAG AA compliant, empty alt values must be allowed. You may want to refer to the alt decision tree document published by the W3C:

An alt Decision Tree
​https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/

[slabbe]

Just read the link in your previous comment. I'll give a try to WP Accessibility.

As I mentionned, I would not enable by default this function but let the admin choose if he want to enable it or not.

[afercia]

Considering alt can’t be made required and title gets already populated, considering also there are a couple pending tickets to try to improve the UI and move the alt field in a more prominent position, I’d propose to close the ticket. Discussion can continue on closed tickets, please do feel free to report any new argumentation.

[SergeyBiryukov]

#43837 was marked as a duplicate.

[joemcgill]

Wanted to add my agreement to @afercia's recommendations here. Since it's possible and sometimes even best to leave alt attributes empty in order to meet WCAG AA requirements, we wouldn't add a setting that forced all alt attributes to be filled in. At most, we might display a warning to remind users to fill in alt attributes.