This event was hosted by the Community and Accessibility Teams on May 16th, 2024.
What Did I Miss❓
🤝 D2L's commitment to accessibility and the 'why' behind accessible content
🧠 Ways you can achieve accessibility best practices in your content
💬 Hearing from a client about how she incorporates accessibility into her content
On Demand Recording📹
We Ran Out of Time For…⌚
Accessibility-Related Learning Center Resources
📝Note: Please ensure you are logged into the Brightspace Community to be authenticated into the Learning Center.
Supporting Screen Reader Users
Supporting Students with Low Vision
Accessible Virtual Presentations
3 Keys to More Accessible Written Communications
Accessibility Lab
Emma O'Neill asked…
Q: "Please may I ask Carin about her thoughts on the balance of detailed descriptions in ALT text for images vs selecting decorative if they do not add key information."
A: The thing is it's all very contextual. Depending on the context, certain details could be very meaningful. For example, in the case of pictures in exhibits on the Human Rights Museum website, details about people's race or gender might be more important, and better describe the picture. In another context, it might not be as important.
I guess I could always default to saying that you should imagine that you're talking to someone on the phone. Would you bother telling them about this picture? Or is it just a flowery background or something else equally meaningless? How much information would you want to tell them? Would it just be a passing couple of words of description, or would you have to take some time to break it down in great detail? If you didn't describe the picture, would they lose some of the message being conveyed?
At the other end of the spectrum, if you have to break it down, maybe it's time to break out a long description. Also, there's the issue of different people wanting different things from their alt text. People who have been blind from birth, like me, just want the most important stuff. "What is the point of this picture?" But people who have lost their vision later on want to get all the details of the visual aspects that I just can't picture because I've never had vision.
So my best advice there is to load the key points at the front, and then if there's time for fluff, add some fluff. The people who want the quick and dirty can move on, while people who want fluff can stay for the fluff.
Supporting Resources📚
Register for a Brightspace Community account (article)
Accessibility Interest Group (inside the community)
Ghost Boy by Martin Pistorius (book)
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (book)
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland (book)
Accessibility Summer Camp (registration page)