Topic on Extension talk:Linter

Hello,

This is Amal Ramadan, the Sr. Community Relations Specialist supporting the Wikipedia mobile apps team.

Our Android team is working on Image Recommendations that will enhance accessibility and user engagement within the Wikimedia mobile apps; our engineers are adding a new lint error type, which is planned to match images without alt text and are expected to trigger on a large number of pages.

It is planned to use this lint category to feed both existing linter-based correction workflows and a "microtask" workflow in the Wikipedia mobile app, where small work tasks can be presented to users in a relevant context.

We want to make sure this won’t be disruptive to existing linter system users and that updates to support the new lint type can be coordinated.

Our current technical evaluation doesn't expect performance problems from this, but if it's overloading people's workflows, we want to be sure to accommodate those needs.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation as we work towards enhancing the Wikipedia mobile app experience.

I just added a lenghy statement at Talk:Wikimedia Apps/Team/Android/Image Recommendations.

TL;DR: It is honourable to try improvement of accessibility, but pushing uneducated people to create alt= descriptions will make the situation worse and will flood the pages with nonsense, resulting in ignoring all image descriptions since most of them are waste of time.