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Alternative Text for Images: How Bad Are Our Alt-Text Anyway?

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Alternative Text for Images: How Bad Are Our Alt-Text Anyway?
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CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Alt text really are one of the low-hanging fruit of an inclusive web. Images need to be described. It is the very first success criteria in WCAG - SC 1.1.1: Non-text Content (Level A). It is so simple, yet it isn't. Despite all the guidance, including presentations like this one, folks get it wrong, over and over again. A lot can be done through using approaches like those recommended in the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0. Clearly, authors need support. This presentation will cover a bit of this theory, but also highlight a simple Python script that I wrote to crawl a website so that we can more easily examine the alternative text that is provided. I'll quickly walk through the script, and then look at some of the more entertaining alt-text which is sitting on public government websites. It is worth noting that there is no automated tool that presently does much more than check that there is alt-text on an image. This clearly isn't sufficient to determining if the meaning of the image is represented in that alt text.