It was something that crossed my mind again when I was uploading some stuff from Tumblr. Many memes we document tend to have text, the importance of which can range from "extraneous" to "the entire punchline."
I think it's kinda inversive that we're a database that's supposed to document as many relevant images as possible for anyone to see at any time afterwards, and yet we have nothing that allows the hard-of-seeing to engage with one of the most fundamental components of memes.
I know that the "img" tag has an "alt" property that's supposed to contain the alternate text for an image, like so (Edit: It doesn't work because something about about how the site interprets textile and HTML, which removes the property in the thread, but not from the Post itself? I still see the alt property when Editing…):
Thus, I propose we have an extra field in the Image Upload page for Alternate Text, which adds the text to the "alt" property of the image being uploaded, allowing for the blind and other people who can't read a language to have easy access to a textual description of the memes we upload.
I know we have the Notes section for miscellaneous things, but I've only seen Phillip (Staff) ever use it for this sort of purpose (and even then, barely). A designated Alternate Text section would put it at the forefront of our minds when we upload, so we don't have to remember, and it can easily be parsed and placed into the property through code magic.
Of course, there is the practical issue of "Some of these memes are comics with a textbook of text and I'm not transcribing that," which is perfectly valid since I'm pretty sure this has become a hobbyist site, and thus spending an hour describing a comic that nobody is going to look at is kind of pointless. Theres also the issue of there only being one website designer on Staff, and the entire database runs on $100 plus any ad revenue it can scrape off of us, so implementation is something else entirely.
Just some food for thought, since it aligns with site goals.
The Weekly Meme Roundup: A Tale Of Two Internets