Hello!
Our edited anthology Thinking About Writing (Thinking About Writing: Readings for Multilingual Writers – Simple Book Publishing) has images for each of the multiple contributors uploaded to the Media library, and we provided image-owner-approved alt text to replace the generic “Contributor photo.” This alt text is visible on the back end, but is not showing up when we inspect the image in the web book or PDF. In the Media site, I can see errors when I inspect the image, but don’t know how to fix them. Can you help?
Many thanks,
Vidya
Hi Vidya, this is a limitation of our About the Author feature in Appearance > Theme Options: when using it to automatically include contributor info at the end of each chapter, the contributor photo alt text is always the generic “Contributor photo,” even if different alt text has been inputted in the Media Library for an image that has been selected as the photo for a given contributor.
The ability to use custom alt text in conjunction with this feature would be something new but I can see how it would be useful. If you’d like, I can file a feature request for this for the developers to think through?
That would be amazing, @ThomasWeideman. It would make the alt text for the author/contributor images more meaningful.
Is there another workaround for getting the images to have the right alt text where accessed (e.g., loading the image on the article page rather than linking to the contributor info)?
Many thanks again for your advice!
Vidya
For sure! I’ve filed it here: Allow custom alt text with About the Author feature · Issue #4099 · pressbooks/pressbooks · GitHub
I believe the one current workaround would be to switch off the About the Author setting in Theme Options and add each contributor photo, along with the corresponding bio, at the end of each chapter. I know this is less than ideal because of the manual work involved, though. But if the image is drawn from the Media Library where alt text has already been inputted, that alt text would be pulled in at the moment the image is added into the chapter editor with the Add Media button.
Thanks once again, @ThomasWeideman! I appreciate your advice and the request to the developers!