We always found it bizarre that Pro provided an -additional- alt text field for images in the editor, which completely ignores the built-in WordPress alt text meta that every image in the Media folder already has…
But we discovered that if the Pro alt image text field is left blank, Pro completely ignores the alt text the image already has assigned to it and instead inserts alt text of “image” which serves no purpose whatsoever and is not ADA compliant.
Can you guys stop doing this as soon as possible and correct it so that existing alt image text is honored (or how about PULL the meta from WordPress for your alt text field so the data is synced? The current solution is a mess).
Here are a couple of reasons mentioned by our core developer.
If we pulled the alt tag through by default, that would result in potentially dozens and dozens of DB calls to check for the existence of an alt tag in the WP media manager, which could lead to performance issues on even moderate page sizes. While I can see this being useful for a blog post with a few images, on a hand-built page with tons of images, it gives us concern for doing this automatically.
Rather than requiring users to painstakingly enter in an alt tag entry for every image uploaded to the WP media manager, they can simply add it to the images they ultimately use in the builder (and easily update inline with all other content in the builder, rather than have to go to an external source to update one piece of information).
I believe that if there’s a better way that this can be achieved in the future, it will be implemented.
I guess I am not understanding why Pro has decided to even offer an additional ALT image text field. Why was this necessary? Why not just leave WordPress’s built in ALT meta that was set in the Media Manager and NOT offer an additional, redundant, and in this case, functionality-breaking “feature”? Just show the ALT meta that’s already there.
Where is the use case for wanting to enter image meta in Pro and not in the Media manager? What if down the road we switch themes? Now EVERY SINGLE IMAGE on the site lacks ALT image data since nobody wants to double enter meta data. This is a BAD practice and should be abandoned ASAP.
If you really need to use the WordPress Media Alt text, use a Text element to output an image. We can’t (at-least currently) force the Image Element’s Alt option to use the WordPress Media Alt text for the reasons mentioned above.
The reason was already mentioned in the previous reply.
I understand our builders’ limitation regarding this so please use a Text element to display your images for now. Like I’ve said previously, I believe our development team will connect to the WordPress Media Alt option if they discover a way that will not degrade the page’s performance.