I educate a category over on the native school right here in Lengthy Seashore and a majority of the content material is hosted on the Canvas LMS so college students can entry it on-line. And, naturally, I would like the content material to be as accessible as potential, so thank goodness Canvas has a11y tooling constructed proper into it.
But it surely ain’t all that rosy. It makes assumptions like all different a11y tooling and adheres to pointers that have been programmed into it. It’s not just like the WCAG is baked proper in and up to date when it updates.
The rationale that is even on my thoughts is that Jeremy yesterday described his love for writing picture descriptions:
I get pleasure from writing
alttextual content. I not too long ago described how I up to date my posting interface right here by myself web site to place atextareaforalttextual content entrance and centre for my notes with images. Since then I’ve been having fun with the inventive problem of writing helpful—but in addition evocative—alttextual content.
I purchase into that! Writing alt textual content is a problem that requires a fragile dance between the technical and the inventive. It’s each a possibility to make content material extra accessible and improve the consumer expertise.
A type of programmed pointers within the Canvas instrument is a cap of 120 characters on alt textual content. Why 120? I dunno, I couldn’t discover any supporting guideline or rule for that precise quantity. One reply is that display readers cease saying textual content after 125 characters, however that’s apparently unfaithful, not less than as we speak. The final recommendation for the way lengthy alt textual content needs to be is available in various levels:
- Jake Archibald talks of size when it comes to emotion. Element is nice, however an excessive amount of element would possibly distort the focus, which makes complete sense.
- Dave sees them as quick, succinct paragraphs.
- Carrie Fisher suggests a 150-character restrict not as a result of display readers will truncate them however extra as a psychological be aware that perhaps issues are getting too descriptive.
- Daniel Göransson says in this 2017 information that it comes right down to context and figuring out when sure particulars of a picture are value extra clarification. However he usually errs on the aspect of conciseness.
So, how lengthy ought to alt textual content be? The final consensus right here is that there isn’t a onerous restrict, however extra of a contextual consciousness of what objective the picture serves and adapting to it accordingly.
Which will get me again to Jeremy’s article. He was writing alt textual content for a gaggle of speaker headshots and realized the textual content was all beginning to sound the identical. He paused, thought in regards to the expertise, in contrast it to the expertise of a sighted consumer, and created parity between them:
The extra audio system have been added to the line-up, the extra I felt like I used to be repeating myself with the
alttextual content. […] The expertise of a sighted individual a web page filled with audio system is that after some time the photographs type of mix collectively. So if thealttextual content additionally begins to sound a bit repetitive after some time, perhaps that’s not such a nasty factor. A display reader consumer could be getting an equal expertise.
I dig that. So should you’re in search of a tough and quick rule on character counts, sorry to disappoint. Like so many different issues, context is king and that’s the type of factor that may’t be codified, and even automated for that matter.
And whereas we’re on the subject, simply seen that Twitter has UI to show alt textual content:
