Alternative Text: A Brief Introduction KATIE ALLEN: Welcome to our accessibility tutorial on alternative text. My name is Katie Allen, and I'm a program associate from the Vera Institute of Justice. This video is about adding alternative text to images and other non-text items in electronic materials to make them accessible for survivors with disabilities. Images help make our outreach training and educational materials more engaging and more accessible. Images also help convey information in a different way than just text. However, some survivors with disabilities will not be able to access the images, charts, graphs, and other visual content in our materials unless we include alternative text. In this video, I'll define alternative text and why it matters for survivors with disabilities. I'll share some examples of alternative text, and I'll demonstrate how to add alternative text and how a screen reader might read it out loud. First, what is alternative text? And why does alternative text matter for accessibility? Alternative text is text that briefly describes the meaning of an image, graph, chart, or any other non-text item. You can add it to the format of the image or non- text item in an electronic document or in web content. Alternative text is not visual. It's mostly for survivors using screen readers and other assistive technologies. What are screen readers? Our blind survivors, deaf-blind survivors, and some survivors with low vision use alternative text to access images and other non-text content in electronic materials, including on our Word documents PowerPoints, PDFs, and on websites. Screen readers read alternative text aloud and refreshable Braille displays. another type of assistive technology convert alternative text to Braille. Some survivors with learning disabilities and other cognitive disabilities may also use screen readers to help with visual or reading comprehension. When should we use alternative text? And how can we find it in documents and online? We should always use alternative text anytime you have an image, photo, chart, graphic, button, symbol, logo, or any non-text element in an electronic document on your website and on social media. Remember, survivors may request documents electronically so that they can access the document with a screen reader. You want to have alternative text and all shareable materials, including brochures, flyers, presentation materials, and any PDFs that we want to share electronically. You can also add alternative text on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I'll share an example now of how screen reader reads alternative text allowed for this image. SCREEN READER (VOICEOVER): Purple ribbon for domestic violence awareness image. KATIE ALLEN: So the screen reader read the image as purple ribbon for domestic violence awareness, and that was the alternative text that we added to this image. Alternative text is not just for electronic documents. It's also for web-based documents. In many cases, your website and social media pages are the gateways for survivors to access services. On your website, you want to be sure that every non-text item has alternative text, and there are usually more non-text items on websites than there are in PowerPoints, flyers, and brochures. And that's because non- text items include things like buttons, symbols, logos, and thumbnails, for example. The website accessibility evaluation tool or WAVE can help you learn if there are access errors on your website and it's free. So you can either copy and paste your website's URL into the WAVE engine or you can add a browser plugin that you can click when you're visiting any website to check for accessibility. The results will come up on a sidebar. In this example, you'll notice that WAVE has flagged six errors. And some of these areas might include missing alternative text from images. You can click on the details to find out what type of errors have been flagged, and it also explains how to fix these errors in user-friendly terms. Next, we'll share some tips about how to write alternative text, and then we'll go over how to add alternative text in Microsoft PowerPoint and on Facebook. How would you describe this image? Context matters most of all. What story are you telling with this image? What information are you trying to convey? I've described this image as a survivor and a female crisis counselor are meeting in a counseling room. The counselor listens and takes notes. This could be different depending on the meaning you're trying to convey. You might say two women meeting to discuss legal matters in a private room or two people having a serious discussion about housing resources or a counselor meets with a family member of a survivor to offer support. Want to be accurate. You don't need to include extra information that's not otherwise conveyed by doing the image visually. Be sure to describe the meaning of the image not just its appearance. Describing the meaning and the message that the image conveys is most important, not the way that it looks. Want to avoid being redundant so we don't need to copy the text that we've already included elsewhere like in the caption to describe the image. And you don't need to add the words image of or picture of because that's already implied. As you notice on our screen reader demonstration, the screen reader read that the purple ribbon was an image after it read the alternative text. Here's some ideas of how not to describe an image. This first example is too long, and it includes a lot of unnecessary information. It says two women sitting in an office on green- spotted armchairs, talking and taking notes. One woman is wearing an aqua shirt with a blazer and the other woman is facing her and has red hair. The second example is too short. It just says two women. And that doesn't convey all the relevant information. Image captions, on the other hand, offer more information than alternative text. Captions might explain more context. A screen reader will read both so they should not be exactly the same. So in this example, the caption says, Portsmouth, Virginia, April 5, 2019. Sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier USS George W. Bush, stand next to flags with encouraging messages during a kickoff event for Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. But the alternative text might say, two US Navy soldiers stand in support of survivors of sexual violence with a flag that says, always stop it before it starts. Next, I'll demonstrate how to add alternative text to an image. To add alternative text in PowerPoint, it will be different depending on your version of PowerPoint and whether or not you're using a Mac or a PC. I'm using PowerPoint from Mac from 2019. So first, I'll right click the image. And I'll select Edit Alt Text from the dropdown menu. Next, a sidebar will appear on the right of your screen, and this is the space to add alternative text for all visual content. This is what the screen reader will read as we demonstrated earlier. The alternative text box is a prompt that says, how would you describe this object in its context to someone who is blind? One to two sentences recommended. And you'll notice that PowerPoint has already automatically generated a description, but the description is not accurate. And it says a picture containing a person, outdoor, young. However, alternative text that we want to add is more specific. We will describe this image as young Black woman with glasses, standing on a train station platform, smiling confidently. And then you can close the window. There are other ways to add alternative text based on your version of Microsoft Office. So another way to add alternative text is to go to the Format dropdown menu and choose Format Object. Then you will click on the Size and Properties option, and that's the option with the square and arrows pointing in different directions. Then you click Alt Text from that list. The Alt Text box will appear on the sidebar as it did before, and you can add a title and a brief description there. So Facebook also automatically generates alternative text for your images. But it's also almost always inaccurate. And I'll show you next how to add alt text for Facebook photos. So you want to click on the photo in Facebook to open it in full view. This is a photo of my cat. Then you go to the bottom of the photo where you have the options to like comment, share, tag photo options, and send in Messenger. And we'll select Options. When you select Options, a menu will appear and you want to go to the menu option with the magnifying glass icon that says Change Alt Text. It's the second option from the top right after Add Location. We'll click Change Alt Text and a pop-up box that gives you the space to change the alternative text appears. So we want to change the alternative text because, right now, it just says cat and indoor. That's the automatically generated option. We want to be more specific. So we'll change it to say Artemis, the Cow Cat is sitting on her desk looking very surprised in front of a lamp. And then you can just click Save. So to recap, alternative text is important for survivors with a variety of disabilities. All images, charts, graphics, graphs, and any non-text item and electronic and web-based materials should include alternative text. Survivors who use assistive technologies access our images and non-text items through alt text. Alternative text descriptions should be accurate and succinct and describing the meaning of the image or non-text item. You can add alternative text in Microsoft Office and on Facebook. And you can check your website's alternative text with WAVE, the website accessibility evaluation tool. And finally, captions and alternative text should be different from each other. This video on alternative text is part of a disability and death resource center series of how-to videos to help your agency increase accessibility of your services outreach and programs to reach survivors with disabilities. This how-to video series includes videos about how to improve accessibility of outreach, educational, training, and intake materials. We also have videos about general accessibility guidelines to help ground this work. The Vera Institute of Justice Center on Victimization and Safety created this video series with a grant from the Office of Violence Against Women at the Department of Justice. The Center on Victimization and Safety or CVS at the Vera Institute of Justice works to ensure that victim services effectively identify, reach, and meet the needs of marginalized crime survivors. We work with survivors to build and strengthen the capacity of communities, organizations, and providers to respond effectively to and prevent sexual violence, domestic violence, and other forms of abuse against people with disabilities and deaf people. So thank you for watching our video. Ending abuse of people with disabilities is a team effort. Please contact us for support. The End abuse email address is at vera.org. The End Abuse phone number is 212-376-3096, and the End Abuse toll free phone number is 855-274-8222.