Accessibility - adding alt text to characters from character library

Mar 28, 2017

Has any thought been given to adding alt text to the characters in the 360 character library so we don't have to add them all manually?  I just tested this in one of the templates which contains characters and none or them have alt text already.  Nor do any of the icons (which are included as images so screenreader would pick them up), charts, placeholder images etc. 

8 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Catherine,

Good question and I'm going to pass it along to our Product team! I know that they're not built with alt text included - but the screen reader would still pick up the name of the object just as another item on the slide like a shape based on how it's listed in the timeline.

Are you thinking for alt text for characters we'd list their name and perhaps the pose they were in, i.e. Lily, facing right one hand on hip

Thanks for the idea and let us know what else you'd like to see in Articulate 360 - our team is always interested in your feature requests. 

Catherine Seal

I'm thinking more "middle aged woman in corporate clothing with hand on hip and smiling".  Although if it is a recurring character, maybe include name and physical description the first time and then call the character by name after that as I imagine overly verbose alt text is almost as annoying as no alt text.   I do know a few accessibility consultants who are themselves vision impaired if you would like me to ask them.    In the meantime, this advice from the UK seems good:  http://www2.le.ac.uk/webcentre/plone/build/basics/add-images/alt-text

It is also the buttons, that have things like lightbulbs, arrows etc on them.  In that case I would think something like "arrow pointing right" would be sufficient.  

If images are purely decorative, I think there is something you can do like alt="" which will cause the screen reader to skim by the image. 

Some more references:

http://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

http://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/decorative/

https://youtu.be/pf_ii8tf-kI

Diana Brandon

It would be great if the alt text could update based on what selections are made (pose, expression, positioning, etc.). For instance, if I selected "Jessica with her arms crossed pose and a worried expression facing right, the alt text would automatically update when I made those selections to be "Jessica, a blonde woman, with arms crossed, facing right with a worried expression". Having that alt text automatically populate with the appropriate selections would save days of work.