Accessibility Awareness

If you use Twitch for any kind of streaming, this resource by Liz Wait can help you make your Twitch channel more accessible to people with disabilities.

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Accessibility Tips for Your Twitch Channel!

Visiting this post is the first step in creating an accessible Twitch channel! Thank you! I've becom...

Many struggle with writing alt text for charts and other other data visualizations. Amy Cesal's "Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization" hammers home the importance of explaining the chart type, the type of data, and the reason for the chart. https://medium.com/nightingale/writing-alt-text-for-data-visualization-2a218ef43f81

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.

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.

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.

Audio descriptions are necessary for making videos accessible. They narrate the crucial visual elements that would be necessary for understanding the plot without the ability to see the screen. They describe non-verbal cues like gestures, facial expressions, or eye contact.

Sharing a meme on social media? Don't forget to include alt text! This resource from Veronica With Four Eyes (Veronica Lewis) will help you.

Veroniiiica

How To Write Alt Text For Memes | Veroniiiica

My favorite tips for how to write alt text for memes, reaction images, and other types of social media comedy content, written by someone with low ...

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.

For screen readers to recognize headings, heading text can't just be body text or normal text that's been made to look bigger and bolder. It must be formatted as a heading. In Microsoft Word and Google Docs, this can be done in the styles box. In HTML, use the tags h1 through h6.

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.