From the course: Foundations of Accessible Elearning

Adding alt text to images

From the course: Foundations of Accessible Elearning

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Adding alt text to images

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- [Narrator] When adding non-text elements to your learning resources, such as images, it's important to add alt text. This stands for alternative text, and it's meant to give a description of an image, so that someone who is unable to see can tell what that image is. And it does that by having a screen reader read the alt text from the image. We gave this example earlier on, where I said these two pictures look the same. However, they're not, because if I right click and then select Alt text, I have alt text in here. So a screen reader would describe this as "Landscape with several large windmills." The bottom one, however, there is no alt text. And for that reason, the screen reader will not be able to identify it. Let's take a look at how this works. So here, I'm going to turn on the screen reader and then navigate down to this image to see what it tells us when we go on the image. - [VoiceOver] Welcome to VoiceOver. - [Screen Reader] (dings) To get missing image descriptions, open the context menu. Unlabeled image. - [Narrator] Boo! So there it told us it's an unlabeled image. We would have no clue what that picture is, and that's not really fair to do. So you want to let everyone know what the image is. Here in this second file, it's different. In this one, there is alt text added to this, although it's not very good alt text because it's hard to describe this. It's really just a KinetEco logo. But if I click on here, you'll see that when I navigate to it, it will tell us that. - [Screen Reader] (dings) KinetEco Logo, image. - [Narrator] So, like that, it told us it was the KinetEco image or logo. So it did tell us what that image was. This is why it's important to add alt text to images that you include in your learning resources.

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