Alt text ideas: Write a short chapter to draft better alt text, review alt texts in the book for clarity, create a collection of alt text for illustrations

[malvikasharan]

Summary

• The Turing Way project has a collection of illustrations that we use across the book, as well as others reuse them: https://zenodo.org/record/6821117
• Several alt texts in the book is non-descriptive and doesn't help the screen readers. Furthermore, people reusing them might be rewriting alt text without realising what good alt text involve

What needs to be done?

• I invite someone with more experience to draft a simple guide to write the alt text in the book, and connect that to the style guide
• Review all the alt texts in the book and make sure they are descriptive: contribute to this PR Some alt texts in the book needs updating to make them descriptive #1987
• Create a new file in the figure folder that has alt texts for all images - this can be published with all our images on Zenodo as well

Who can help?

• Anyone with experience or understanding of alt texts and how they help screen readers
• Anyone willing to learn about Alt text while contributing to The Turing Way

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Updates

• NA

[malvikasharan]

References:

• Digital accessibility:
  • https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images
  • https://www.rnib.org.uk/accessibility-guidelines-alt-text-what-you-need-know
  • https://www.deque.com/blog/great-alt-text-introduction/
• SEO (maybe useful for a small subsection of our readers): https://supercooldesign.co.uk/blog/how-to-write-good-alt-text

[malvikasharan]

• Shared by @EstherPlomp:
  • Presentation: https://medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization-2a218ef43f81
  • Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWB-KLXN-Ok
• Feedback by @IsabelBirds: "I've asked to take a look if they get a chance. From a quick chat they noticed some of the examples "better" alt texts are actually too long - you can only screen read alt text at one speed, all at once - so they should have some useful tips to share at the very least :) "

[LauraCarter]

Another good resource for this: https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

[LauraCarter]

And another one, specifically on writing alt text for data visualisations! https://medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization-2a218ef43f81

[IsabelBirds]

@LauraCarter I was just about to link the webaim page too, @RobPrecious recommended that as the best place to start.