Do Lemmy users benefit from alt text in posts that contain photos?

Well the blind community benefits as they can get the contents without having to ocr the screenshot and decode the jumbled nonsense of the picture to try to figure out wtf you are on about.

As well as making something accessible for users that might otherwise have difficulty, it also makes image content more searchable, so you might benefit yourself from it one day.

Every time someone posts a wall of text as an image, or a meme with poor contrast text, or some random image that can only be interpreted on a 4k screen, rather than a mobile phone.

Aside from sight-challenged people, there are also the ones that don't speak the language of the meme/photo. You can take the text and paste it into an automated translator, with a meme it's harder to do. That's particularly important with memes that have slang/jargon/regional content.

Yes, my ability to process text is much better than my ability to process an image. This is best practice for a reason.

I sometimes have trouble reading the text in the image. Then I am glad to have the alt text.

It definitely helps blind people who have to browse with screen readers.

Even if most of the time they might not benefit anyone, it takes like 30 seconds tops to add one so why wouldn't we. They can also be easily generated with AI, one of the actually useful use cases for it.

Rarely. Almost always, when I see those transcriptions, the text on the image is well readable. In cases where the text is awful, there are no transcriptions.

It'll benefit some people who are blind. It will also benefit search engines and AI scrapers as you give context for the image. Whether that is good or bad is up to you.

There's a lot of comments in here saying, "it helps the blind community", but not a single comment that says, "I'm blind and it helps me".

I don't doubt that it would help, but might be one of those "we should do X for Y" cases where X isn't really benefitting Y in a meaningful way.