Deprecate the caption field from the media modal

[andraganescu]

While working on keeping authored captions in Gutenberg (​https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/15004), I realised that having "attachment captions", a property of "caption" for the attachment entity, makes little sense (to me).

A caption's role is to describe the figure in context. Alt text is a precise description of the image, which, yes, is common to all contexts, but caption seems to be directly influenced by where I use an image.

Say I have a picture of a beautiful apple. If I use it in an article about how Apple stock is doing well, then I might caption it "Apple stock is ripe to sell". However, if I use it in an article about the way Magic Mouse is charging, I might caption it "Thank God Apple didn't design apples". In both cases the Alt text would be "Picture of a ripe apple".

Can we, or is there at least a possibility, to deprecate having captions in the media modal attached to each image there?

[joemcgill]

Hi @andraganescu thanks for the suggestion! I definitely understand the logic in having captions be editable from within the post context, and I'm glad to see improvement being made to the editor that makes this much more clear. However, there are many contexts where being able to set a default caption for an image is useful, so we wouldn't want to remove this feature entirely. For example, many organizations add photographer attribution to each image in the caption field so that attribute is included no matter what page or post that image gets added to.

I could see us rethinking this in the future during a redesign of the media library, but don't think this is something we want to do for now.

[afercia]

Alt text is a precise description of the image, which, yes, is common to all contexts

This is a common misconception. The alt text is meant to describe the function / purpose of the image in a specific context: ​https://www.w3.org/TR/html52/semantics-embedded-content.html#alt-text

Of course, it varies depending on the nature of the image: decorative images, functional images, informative images, complex images, etc. More details: ​https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decision-tree/