feat(gatsby-remark-images): add option to use alt text as caption fallback

[chasemccoy]

gatsby-remark-images has a wonderful option to show captions under images using the title attribute, or the alt attribute if no title is provided. This causes us some issues, because we have a lot of images that we don't want captions for, but we do want to provide alt text (for accessibility reasons).

This PR adds a new configuration option to the gatsby-remark-images plugin:

fallbackToAltTextForCaptions - (defaults to true) If showCaptions is set to true and the title attribute is empty, this specifies whether the alt attribute should be used as a caption. If true it will be used, and if false the caption will be omitted if there is no title attribute.

This is my first time contributing to Gatsby, so my apologies if I get any of this wrong. I am not sure what we want to call the option (I went with fallbackToAltTextForCaptions because it was clear, but happy to pick a less verbose name). I also wrote a test to cover this case and updated the README of the plugin to document the new option.

[chasemccoy]

@DSchau I think you helped review the PR to accept the alt attribute as a fallback caption (#13489), so tagging you here for visibility.

[m-allanson]

Thanks @chasemccoy! Thinking aloud, here's an alternative approach (maybe this is a terrible idea though?) - instead of creating a new option, we could override the existing showCaptions option.

• Passing a boolean true or false would retain the existing behaviour
• Passing an array with multiple values like ["alt", "title"] or ["title", "alt"] would specify the order that the fields should be checked. The default source value would be the first string in the array, with any further items acting as fallback source values
• Passing a single value array would specify the only source value, e.g. ["title"]

This is similar to how the withWebP and tracedSVG options work, and hopefully covers any ordering someone would like to use.

If we really wanted to, we could allow passing a string title or alt as a shortcut for a single value array.

What are your thoughts @DSchau and @chasemccoy?

[chasemccoy]

@m-allanson Hmm, I like that idea quite a lot! Question: would passing true be equivalent to ["title", "alt"]? I believe that is the default behavior now (use title first, alt second if the showCaption option is true)

[chasemccoy]

@m-allanson Okay, I just pushed up my first stab at this behavior. I wrote some new tests as well to make sure everything works as expected, and I updated the README to reflect this new behavior. My implementation assumes that true is equivalent to ["title", "alt"], but let me know if that's not the case.

[freiksenet]

There is a linter failure in the switch block, could you fix it please? Otherwise looking good. CC @m-allanson

[chasemccoy]

@freiksenet Okay, it should be fixed now! Thanks!

[chasemccoy]

@m-allanson @freiksenet Could y'all give a 👍 on this if it's ready? Would love to get this published so that my team can use it 🙂

[wardpeet]

Looks great! I added another test and fixed a small that it doesn't fallback to alt when title is the only attribute specified & can't be found.

[gatsbot]

Holy buckets, @chasemccoy — we just merged your PR to Gatsby! 💪💜

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Thanks again!

[m-allanson]

Thanks @chasemccoy! 🎉

[chasemccoy]

Thank you all so much!

[wardpeet]

Published in gatsby-remark-images@3.0.15