Re: Alt Text changes at the GDS?
Eyyy it’s been a minute.
Thought I’d get this thing up and running properly, finally. And for my first real post, I’m going to quickly do a better job of the alt text debacle reaction that is currently doing so many goddamn numbers on my .art account.
So!
The thread I wrote was a quick, off the cuff reaction to a blog posted by the Government Digital Service (GDS), which basically runs the UK Government’s website. In the blog, they talked about doing a bit of research which highlighted their content management system (CMS, in this case, Whitehall) had a confusing user interface (UI) when it comes to adding images to their content for publishing.
They did a bit of back and forth with a small team and, essentially they’ve changed the UI to make uploading images easier. However, while fixing their UI to make content management easier, they’ve also removed the option to add alt text to their images, citing ease of accessibility and availability to everyone.
My day job is actually in digital accessibility, I’m part of a small team that basically does the majority of the accessibility for a very large organisation, so this sort of thing is part of my every day. When we learned about this move, and from the GDS, (which is considered something of a leading voice in accessibility!) we were pretty confused!
Hence my rather flippant little reaction thread!
So, more seriously then.
Maybe the GDS has a pretty good reason for removing the alt text field, and maybe they even have pretty good user research to back up what they suggest doing instead (putting the image descriptions in the body content), but we don’t know either of those things for sure yet. So, just working on what we have got, I am at least a little concerned.
As I mentioned in my original thread, alt text isn’t only beneficial for screen reader users. That’s the original point of it, of course, but alt text is used by so many more people in so many more ways now.
- Screen reader users, of course, not just to know what they can’t see, but also to navigate the page, and to get a bit more context for the page by listing all the images and their information.
- Partially sighted or colour blind users who can partially see the image, will get a better chance to understand what it’s meant to convey via the alt text.
- Other assistive technology users, such as speech-to-text users who can use images to navigate and get more information in similar ways to screen readers.
- Neurodiverse and cognitively disabled users will access the alt text in order to find more context to better understand the image, especially if it’s highly topic specific, a meme, a complicated graph, a piece of art, etc.
- Alt text can also be a stop-gap solution for when images aren’t loading, either due to crap bandwidth or site maintenance issues. And for users who have all images turned off.
Instead, the GDS is suggesting including the image descriptions as part of the main body content. Though they didn’t explain how – do they mean in an academic sense, with numbered image references, or do they mean full alternative text content that is simply part of the overall text? We just don’t know at this point, unfortunately.
People who know a bit more than average about image accessibility may also be aware that there is already a recommended mechanism for giving universal access to image descriptions. The long description.
The long description is typically created by writing something like the following in the alt tag:
[<]alt=“Image of [thing], see long description”[>]
And then adding the long description itself in an expanding text box directly after the image. This can be opened by anyone with a simple mouse click or keyboard stroke.
The problem with adding the descriptions into the main content is that it removes all the advantages I mentioned above, and creates a host of new issues.
- If using academic style image references, you’re adding a new layer of confusion for ND and cognitively disabled folks.
- If using the descriptions embedded in the main text, you’re adding the need to find the image it’s referring to, and the reverse, needing to find the description that goes with the image you’ve been examining.
- By adding either version, you’re adding a lot of extra information to the page that ordinarily would be visually hidden, reducing the clutter and noise on the page. Too much information in a page can negatively impact ND and cognitively disabled folks experiences.
- How does this change affect assistive technology users? The GDS hasn’t shared any end user research on the matter.
- It might actually be in breach of WCAG 1.1.1 Non-Text Content, which is… interesting.
There’s probably a host of other issues that I haven’t thought of just yet. And of course, the GDS might have some mitigating information that I’m not yet aware of.
As it stands, though, I feel like this is a step too far into overcorrection. It started as a series of steps in order to reduce content creator errors, most of which seem legitimate, but included removing the alt text field, which is far less so.
I might change my tune, if the GDS clarifies the decision! But I’m not currently a fan of this change to their position on their alt text field.
H
Call me Aitch!
