Describing Visual Resources Toolkit for Accessibility in Arts & Humanities Publications

[jesse_the_k]

Describing Visual Resources Toolkit for Accessibility in Arts & Humanities Publications

https://describingvisualresources.org/

The Univ of Michigan has prepared an excellent tool kit for anyone creating text descriptions of visual material. This isn't only relevant to blind or visually impaired users. Folks with narrow bandwidth often turn off image loading so that they can navigate the web in under four days. Adblocking software can also eat your images without warning.

The resource is also notable for how it's structured. They provide entry paths for different users. They reuse the same info in many orders, which increases the chance of matching the user's needs.

For the first time, I understood the differences between "alt" text and "longdesc"! They also make the c dial point that you can't design for today's technology.

Comments

[ambyr]

I feel like their discussion of longdesc misses one of the basic principles of longdesc, namely that the only thing that should be included in the longdesc field is a link to a page with a long textual description, not the actual description itself. See WebAIM's discussion of longdesc.

Thank you!

[jesse_the_k]

Oh my goodness! Thank you for correcting that. From just reading the toolkit, I'd inferred the crucial differences was the inclusion of the markup that,s not available in alt.

[jazzyjj]

Thanks for this. I wasn't clear either on the difference between longdesc and alt text. Great resources though. While we're on the subject, I just updated to OS X High Sierra, Apple's latest offering for the Mac. One of the new features is image descriptions for VoiceOver users. For those that don't know, VoiceOver is Apple's on-board screen reader. I've tried out this feature thus far only briefly, but it seems to work well despite still being in its initial stage of implementation.