Sudden Movement of Alt-Text Image Details Input Box

[mitchellk]

The sudden movement of the alt-text input box in WordPress 5.2 is rather annoying. It has been in the same place forever and now is moved to the top above the Image Title. While I understand you may be trying to make new users aware of the importance of alt-text on an image, you seem to have overlooked your millions of existing users who expect something to be where it has remained for some 15 years. In fact I have already accidentally posted 3 new images yesterday where I forgot to add my alt text as a result of you having moved this. Seriously think it should remain where it always was. Sudden design changes like this are not necessary and only cause frustration and mistakes in people's workflows. Alternatively please give us settings to allow us to choose the layout and order of those image details.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Introduced in [45158].

[ianbelanger]

Changes made in [45158] are related to [44900] where the alt field was moved to the in media modals.

Related tickets: #41612, #46875

[garrett-eclipse]

An additional side effect of the move here was it creates a displacement on the title and Caption fields when using the Edit Image modal that many custom field plugins such as ACF use.

[joedolson]

There is a past history of users being confused by the previous placement, thinking that the title was the most important value to complete and ignoring the alt attribute. This change, in the long-term, is expected to lead to better alt attributes, although yes, it will require some minor re-learning of the UI.

The accessibility team believes that this is a long-term improvement in the user interface. The fact that people are accustomed to the previous order is not a good argument for not changing an interface; if we find that the new placement causes long-term usability problems, we can re-assess, but for now this is not an issue we intend to revert.