How should we serve users who cannot access images?

Question

Suppose we accept that images are allowed, at least sometimes, as discussed in Whether or not images instead of FEN/PGN are allowed. Now the question is: How should we serve users who cannot access these images?

This seems to have been covered already in Editing Help:

The word in square brackets is the alt text, which gets displayed if the browser can't show the image. Be sure to include meaningful alt text for screen-reading software.

But users rarely (if ever) comply with this advice. And it is hard for them to do so, even when they want to. Whether or not images instead of FEN/PGN are allowed gives examples of where images are useful, all of which involve chess positions. What is a “meaningful alt text” for a chess position?

Does this question have a good answer, or do we need to rethink our policy on images?

Answer 1

Yes, I'm guilty of not adding alt texts most of the time (not here, I mean across the network).

As said in the question you linked to, feel free to convert an image of a chess position to the built-in PGN viewer if that does not constitute a loss of information. If it does, the FEN may be a meaningful alt text (if it's not elsewhere in the post already). Perhaps with additional information like "White's last move was Nf3-e5". Alt texts like "position under analysis" aren't helpful, that can most of the times be deducted from where the image appears in the post.

As with all edits, they bump the posts to the homepage, so be careful not to make too many at the same time (3 per day is a good rule of thumb).