Hey students! Hope ya had a good Thanksgiving, this week we’re gonna come back from break with a light, easy topic: Alt Text.
So, first off,
What is alt text?
In this context, alt text is a little bit of text attached to an image. If used correctly, it will describe, in brief, what the image is.
Why is it important?
For people who have vision impairments, they need to use a screen reader in order to access the internet. This is a software, that, well, goes through a web page and reads it off to them. Sounds simple, but think of how complicated some documents can be: you can have figures, animations, pictures. For a lot of web-pages, these are just decorative and can be ignored. However many documents might have an image that it’s at least useful to understand is there in order to properly understand the text. Alt text is therefore a brief description of the image in question that a screen reader can pick up, explaining to the user what the image is.
How do I edit it?
Well, that very much depends on the platform you’re using. For the sake of this post, we’ll only go over Microsoft Office Products, Adobe Acrobat, and This Website.
Microsoft Office Products
The Good News:
It’s very easy to access and edit alt text with Microsoft Word. All you need to do is right-click on the image, and click on “View Alt Text” on the drop-down menu.
From there, you’ll get this sidebar menu:
You can edit the alt text in that little box. Apparently Microsoft Word will also be able to auto-generate alt text for you in some cases, though this was not one of them. (And it is the unofficial stance of the Help Desk that you should not rely on AI to write for you!)
The Better News:
PowerPoint is the same! Exact same UI and everything. This was expected, but it was worth double-checking and noting it here.
Adobe Acrobat
PDFs are notoriously difficult to work with regarding accessibility. Luckily, Adobe Acrobat has a whole suite of tools that you can access using the Toolbar on the left.
(Unfortunately, the red box is supplied by the Help Desk, you’ll need to bring your own)
From there, you’ll want to click on “Add alternate text” (simple enough, to be honest).
Now, from here it might get a little intense. It will ask your permission to scan the document and detect all figures to display their alternative text. From there, you’ll move through the figures one-by-one to view their alt text and edit it to your liking. It certainly can take a long time, which is why it’s probably good to make sure you have all your alt text sorted when you’re working in Microsoft before formatting it to a PDF.
This Website
Now, I know it probably seems kind of pointless to go over how to edit alt text on a website that most of you will probably never use. So why would we do this? Well, this website is actually a great case study in a platform that has no in-built tool to edit alt text (something I learned the hard way when making our last post). To edit it, we would actually need to edit is as an HTML file. Yes, that means Coding!
So, if you click on an image here, you can access its HTML by clicking on the three dots on the far-right of a toolbar that appears, like so:
From here, you’ll be given a dropdown that lets you select “Edit as HTML”. Once you do so, it will replace the image with this line of code:
See where alt is highlighted? Well from there, you can just type your alt text within those quotation marks! Easy as that!
Now, different platforms may have different means of accessing a photo’s HTML code, but once there it should all be more or less the same. That leaves only one last question I feel should be answered…
What Makes Good Alt Text?
What makes good alt text is, it turns out, complicated. I fully wanted to do a how-to within the scope of this article, but a proper overview on good alt text would be an article of its own. So I’m going to outsource it to this website. It’s a good read, and not particularly long, but it is about as long as what I have already written and in all honesty I expect all my readers are at least as busy as I am.
Till next time!