Q:

How to handle questions with code as images

When someone (typically a first-time poster) posts a question that contains code presented as an image, we're supposed to encourage them to edit the question and repost as plain text, for all the usual reasons:

Images aren't searchable.
Images aren't copy/pastable.
Images aren't accessible for blind/low vision people (and if the image quality is low, are problematic even for people with full vision.)

However, I've seen some questions where the images were small and quite readable (by me personally) and gave me everything I needed to answer the question, so it feels a bit dishonest (and even a bit fussy!) to say that I can't answer it.
In such a case, should we stand on principle and ask the user to repost as text?  I fear that by doing this, we just drive away first-time posters.

A:

It is an absolute requirement that the sample code (minimal, reproducible example) be posted as text, within the body of the question itself. Thus, according to Stack Overflow's guidelines/expectations, you cannot answer the question in its current state.
You have two choices:

If you're willing, the task is reasonable in scope, and by doing so the finished product would be an otherwise on-topic, answerable question for Stack Overflow, you can edit the question yourself to transcribe the image into text.

or

You can simply cast a vote to close the question as "a community-specific reason → needs debugging details", which provides the following guidance to the asker:

Questions seeking debugging help ("why isn't this code working?") must include the desired behavior, a specific problem or error and the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers. See: How to create a Minimal, Reproducible Example.

This guidance/explanation pretty much covers that the shortest code necessary to reproduce the problem must appear in the question itself. If you like, you can also leave a comment explaining that we do not allow images of code, and that the asker needs to paste the code into the question as text. A comment I sometimes use for this goes as follows:

Please add code and errors as text (using code formatting), not images. Images are problematic for many reasons, including that they don't allow copy-pasting text for testing or searching.

So, basically…yes:

In such a case, should we stand on principle and ask the user to repost as text? I fear that by doing this, we just drive away first-time posters.

I do not believe that this will drive away first-time posters. They are invested in getting an answer, so they'll simply do the little chore or jump over the little hurdle that we're asking them to do. Hopefully, next time, they will have this requirement in mind and thus avoid making the same mistake again. In the meantime, we've all done our part to ensure that the question is useful to others in the future, which is the true purpose of this site. (Remember that Stack Overflow is not a help desk. Our mission is not so much to help the asker, but rather to build up a library of high-quality Q&A on programming topics. Helping the asker is a nice side benefit, but our model is much more akin to Wikipedia than some hypothetical HireAProgrammer.com.)

