A few posts on alt-text

We really care about accessibility, and alt-text is one of the most visible interventions in this field, thanks to its inclusion in social media UIs and to activist evangelism.

As a primer, Eric Bailey wrote some thoughts about the nuances of the matter: https://ericwbailey.website/published/thoughts-on-embedding-alternative-text-metadata-into-images/

Also check out this post by Heather Buchel, with a much broader focus: https://heather-buchel.com/blog/2024/03/letters-to-an-accessibility-advocate/

What follows are instead our own thoughts.

Decorative Images

The general idea is that alt-text is going to be used by anyone who cannot look at a picture, and that it should be as good a substitute as possible. We should think about the meaning of a picture, and about its function in the webpage, and about how the alt-text will be used in practice. A whole lot of images are simply decoration, and the general advice is to exclude them, so that text to speech systems don’t waste time reading descriptions that don’t actually carry any meaning.

However, even extraneous decoration carries connotations that influence the interpretation of the written word. Should we attempt to transmit the same connotations to every user? And should we attempt to provide cultural context for those who lack it? This is the kind of thinking that leads to people giving short self-descriptions at the beginning of online conferences, something that seems to be quite common in the US. I have nothing against it, but I also don’t really understand the value of it. I’ll happily do it when it’s asked, but I don’t do it of my own initiative.

Rich Images

What about images that carry a lot of information? Charts, and graphs, or increasingly maps. How do we enable everyone to access the information in our own 3D spaces?

The short answer is that we try to follow the W3C guidelines:

1. https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/complex/
2. https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/informative/

The longer answer is that it is a bit of an art form, and that sometimes the only solution is to be redundant, and just recreate everything in good old text. This can be hard work, but nobody claimed that having principles is easy.

Specifically for visual art, it is sometimes very hard to motivate clients, we’ve often heard the argument that visually impaired users are intrinsically excluded, or intrinsically uninterested. We’re glad to report that our clients from the banking sector have been universally fully committed to accessibility, they’re institutionally used to it being a legal requirement. (They do tend to use overlays a bit too much, for my tastes)

AI

There has been much ado about the usage of AI for generating alt-text. This is something that already happens a whole lot on social networks. Famous web-usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote about it recently (I mean, it’s a bit of a wider argument, but very related), and it caused a bit of a shitstorm in the community. I’m just going to link to Adrian Roselli’s take: https://adrianroselli.com/2024/03/jakob-has-jumped-the-shark.html

My own take is that the work needed to make a site accessible is all going towards making the website better.