Notices by Accessibility Awareness (a11yawareness@disabled.social)

Everyone who works on a website has a role to ensure the site and its content are accessible. This resource from Vox Media breaks down some accessibility tasks by job role, including content creators, designers, developers, project managers, and testers.

https://accessibility.voxmedia.com/

Sighted users often use bold or large fonts to create the appearance of headings in documents. People using screen readers have no way of understanding these visual cues. Use heading styles from the styles menu to correctly format headings.

The Game Accessibility Guidelines have been put together by game studios, specialists and academics. While they are not an official set of standards or documents, they are a collection of tips and techniques to help developers make games more inclusive.

https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/

Don’t stuff your alt text with keywords without context. If your alt text is just a collection of keywords, it will just sound like a gibberish string. It won’t describe what’s actually in the image, and won't help a blind user get a context or content of the image.

Vestibular disorders affect people's balance as well as their visual perception of their world around them. Don't make animations, sliders, videos, or rapid movement start automatically, as autoplaying elements could trigger a bad reaction in people who have vestibular disorders.

Some are suggesting you deliberately write inaccurate or confusing alt text, because they say this confuses AI scrapers that are analyzing images.

The purpose of alt text is to help people who cannot see the image. Deliberately misrepresenting the image is a gross misuse of alt text. Don't do it.

Consistent layout makes websites easier to navigate and understand as it helps users learn what elements to expect and in what order. This is especially helpful to low vision users or blind users using a screen reader. It also helps those with cognitive and learning disabilities.

Avoid emoji icons in alt text. Emoji icons are a visual element, so it's counterintuitive to add them to non-visual content. You'll likely confuse people with messages that don't make sense. In alt text, use plain text, free of symbols, icons, or any weird special characters.

Do not cram alt text with keywords just to improve search engine optimization. This will hinder alt text’s true purpose: improving accessibility. Focus on describing the photo's content. Search engine optimization should not be the goal for writing good alt text.

When using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, don't just make text bigger and bolder to make it a heading. That will work for sighted users, but screen reader users will miss that and just hear it as normal paragraph text. Use actual heading styles, like level 1 through 6.

When creating PDFs, avoid using "Print to PDF." A screen reader user may still be able to access the text of PDFs created this way, but heading structure, alternative text, and any other tag structure will be lost. Using "Save As" or "Export" can preserve these tags.

When you make the pitch for accessibility, be prepared for pushback. There are several myths and misconceptions, so it's good to be aware of what they are and how to dispel them.

https://a11ymyths.com/

People who want to make the web accessible need to understand the many different ways that people with disabilities use the web. This W3C resource offers a good introduction to how disabled people navigate the web, and barriers they commonly encounter.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/

When writing alt text, focus on what's truly important. In an image with text about a canceled event, the borders of the image are not nearly as vital as conveying that this event is now canceled. A decorative border can be mentioned, but it's not the most important element; the cancellation is.

Looking for information on accessibility laws? Lainey Feingold has a resource on digital accessibility laws and policies that she's updated over the years. Though not exhaustive, it has great insight, histories, explanations, and links.
https://www.lflegal.com/global-law-and-policy/

Do not cram alt text with keywords just to improve search engine optimization. This will hinder alt text’s true purpose: improving accessibility. Focus on describing the photo's content. Search engine optimization should not be the goal for writing good alt text.

You don't necessarily need to say "image of" in your alt text for users to know it's an image. Screen readers will announce that it's an image. But it can help readers to specify if it's a hand-drawn image, Polaroid, infographic, screenshot, chart, map, diagram, or so on.

If you have an election results chart, the alt text needs to communicate the results. "Election results" is not enough. The same rules apply for alt text for images of weather charts. "Weather chart" doesn't cut it and doesn't convey what the chart is actually saying to users.

People often ask what accessibility considerations to keep in mind when creating data visualizations. For guidance and advice, check out Sarah L. Fossheim's list of 10 things to do (or not do) when designing accessible data visualizations.

https://fossheim.io/writing/posts/accessible-dataviz-design/

Many live with the limitations of not understanding numbers and the impact that has on everyday life. Laura Parker's Accessible Numbers project offers guidance on how to design services and write content for people who need help with numbers.

https://accessiblenumbers.com/