Some photos I see posted here are worth attention. I will, however, not repeat/boost the ones without image descriptions. And I see examples of those every day.
My wish is for #accessibility to be given more priority when posting images in social networks. In my personal experience it’s gotten a bit worse with the growth of the fediverse.
Later today I’m running an hour long session on writing Alt text and image descriptions, for people enrolled in Ambition Empower*.
Thinking perhaps I should do a public access one as well, if there’s interest. Image descriptions can benefit everyone.
*If you’re a designer or design leader, the Empower program may interest you:
https://ambitiongrp.com/empower/
I just visited 15 blogs about dogs. I wanted to see how well they described all the fun pictures of dogs and their owners. As it turns most alt texts were less than adequate, if they even had any. Some were just stuffed with keywords, and some appeared to be written by AI's, failing to add context.
After 14 sites visited, I finally I found a blog about dogs that does a great job with alt text. Would it surprise you to learn that it is a website about leader dogs?
#accessibility #a11y
https://www.leaderdog.org/
A bit of trivia about alt text.
The ALT attribute for describing images was introduced in a 1993 Internet Draft about HTML. At this time many people online were still using text-only browsers and people wanted to know what the images were about. Some people just couldn't afford to wait for them to download.
In 1999, with the release of HTML 4.01, the ALT attribute was made to be a requirement for the img and area tags.
1999 is also the year Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 were published. The very first checkpoint starts like this:
"1.1 Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via "alt", "longdesc", or in element content)."
What should be a point of internet embarrassment: Microsoft's Internet Explorer rendered the ALT attribute in the wrong way, as a tooltip, all the way until 2009 when IE8 was released. Microsoft got the standard wrong for ten years. This of course also led to many developers using it incorrectly as a tooltip.
Fast forward to 2023 and the ALT attribute is unfortunately still something not many people who build websites care much about. And I rarely see it in the curriculum of courses that provide education for web editors and writers.
#accessibility #a11y
Edits: Removed reference to HTML 1.2 (this was not a html version but a version number of the Internet Draft). Also changed HTML 4.1 to 4.01. See comments by @mjgardner