Complex Images, Tables, Graphs

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From the course by University of Colorado Boulder

Basics of Inclusive Design for Online Education

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University of Colorado Boulder

Basics of Inclusive Design for Online Education

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This course provides instruction and strategies to support you in developing a course that is inclusive to students with a wide range of abilities, including students with disabilities. We cover effective practices to increase inclusion and avoid some of the common accessibility issues that can arise in an online course. In particular, Basics of Inclusive Design Online covers course organization, the accessibility of Microsoft Office and PDF documents, making course instruction pages accessible, captioning of videos, making images accessible, and designing for learning differences. We also discuss how inclusive course materials can help all students, including students without disabilities. This course will appeal to those who want both a broad overview of the range of accessibility considerations and also a step-by-step guide of how to check documents for accessibility, caption a video, or prepare course content for non-visual users. Course logo credit: "web accessibility word cloud" by Jill Wright (https://goo.gl/xyUoeU). Copyright - some rights remain. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

From the lesson

Week 3: Complex Images, Tables, Graphs

Week 3 will focus on creating appropriate text alternatives for complex images and other more complex material, such as data tables and graphs. The assignment will provide you the opportunity to add alternate text to images.

Complex Images, Tables, Graphs2:35

Meet the Instructors

Emily Moore
Director of Research and Accessibility, PhET Interactive Simulations
Department of Physics
Howard Kramer
Accessibility Specialist
OIT
Clayton Lewis
Professor
Department of Computer Science

In the last module, we discussed, among other topics,

the importance of real text and PDFs.

And the importance of structure provided through headings in both Word and

PDF documents.

We also touched upon the importance of alternate text,

that is providing short text descriptions for images.

This week we'll talk more about selecting appropriate alternate text,

also known as alt text.

And descriptions for images and for other complex objects such as tables and graphs.

Let's review and expand on the recommendations for

alternate texts that we introduced last week.

As a rule, alternate texts should be succinct and accurate.

Your description should describe the image accurately, but as concisely as possible.

Usually a few words will suffice, although a sentence or two is permissible.

Although there is no definitive or hard limit, 100 characters or

less is a typical suggested maximum length.

We'll talk about methods for describing more complex images that require longer

descriptions later in this module.

Avoid using image of or graphic of in the description.

Assistive technologies, such as screen readers,

already convey this information to the user and this will just add to redundancy.

For example, in this segment from a Wikipedia page on the Guggenheim Museum,

the alt text NYC- Guggenheim Museum.jpg or JPG describes a photo of the museum.

A better choice of the alt text would simply be Guggenheim Museum.

The NYC at the beginning and

JPG at the end of the text apparently carried over from the file name.

This part is not necessary and will cause confusion when read aloud by assistive

technology or viewed by someone who has images turned off on their device.

If this article was about the diverse architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright,

then it might be appropriate to succinctly describe the building in greater

detail with at text such as,

cylindrical shaped Guggenheim Museum with a striking gray concrete exterior.

The key to deciding how to describe an image with alt text is to consider what

information the image is conveying.

Then try to convey that information concisely.

In the next video, we'll show more examples and review the process for

entering alt text for images in Word using the Word accessibility checker.

We'll also introduce the procedure for describing tables, and

making them more accessible in Word documents.

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