Software Developers Shouldn’t Overlook Alt Text
Written by
Tammy Xu
Published on Dec. 01, 2021
Alternative texts are an important part of making websites accessible for users who are blind or visually impaired, but writing them isn’t always straightforward. Alt texts are text descriptions paired with images on a webpage that users can hear when they use screen readers. While guidelines exist for writing alt text — like keeping them short and concise — in practice, the task can feel quite open-ended.
Crystal Preston-Watson, a digital accessibility analyst at Salesforce, explored this tension in the inaugural episode of her A11y Savvy podcast. The episode, “Do Blind People Dream of Electric Memes?,” talked about the difficulty of writing alt text for memes. Many memes [...]