Alternative Methods

Following Rianna’s presentation about alt text, I started writing my own alt text for the various images I’ve added to my website this week. I wasn’t previously aware of this feature in building my website, and hadn’t realized how it could contribute to its accessibility. This feature provides a link to the Web Accessibility Initiative’s webpage that advises how to use alt text, which is helpful since I hadn’t thought of how to use it beyond description of the image. For example, it can be useful for images that link to another page, to explain what page it will direct the user to. This functional purpose provides accessibility in a general sense, which shows how alt text is helpful for everyone rather than just those with a specific disability like blindness. W3.org also recognizes that for more complex images like graphs, text outside of the alt text should appear somewhere on the page to explain the image, which differentiates the function of alt text from that of a caption. This is all useful information for creating more user-friendly navigation, for those with disabilities and without. It was generally easy to write very short descriptions of images I was using, but sometimes it can be difficult to decide what is relevant about the image to include in the description, if I want to make it as concise as possible. Going forward, I’ll also have to take into consideration whether I want the alt text to explain where a linked image will direct the user if they click it. Overall, I think this is a really useful feature to think about, and makes me wonder what else I can incorporate to make my website more accessible, into its makeup rather than just adding an accessibility plugin.