I thought I’d pass along the following message from JISC.
It is important to ensure that the visual content of your website and learning resources has alternative text for those who either cannot see the visual content or struggle to make sense of its interpretation.
However, how do you know what is an appropriate description? And some visual content is merely eye candy and is best hidden entirely from screenreader users rather than wasting their time announcing something that is meaningless to the learning experience.
Making this different choices requires a certain degree of understanding but the good news is that there are some excellent free training resources out there. A recent quote from a Vision Australia newsletter reminded me of the Poet training Tool (which I’ve used – and it has nothing to do with poetry!).
Vision Australia’s partner, Benetech has provided an initiative called Poet Training Tool which provides best practice guidelines and exercises that will help you grow your skills in writing effective image descriptions benefiting everyone who needs to access your digital documents, web pages and mobile apps.
This free resource is broken up into 3 helpful sections:
- Helps you determine when a description is actually needed.
- Provides guidelines on how to write an effective description (with examples).
- Upload content and practice writing your own descriptions.
If you or your colleagues are going to be involved in revisiting digital images on your website or learning platform then I highly recommend using these resources.
Alistair McNaught
Subject specialist – accessibility
