Takeaways from How Learning American Sign Language Improved My Alt Text

Thanks to Accessibility New York City (A11y NYC) livestreaming their January 2017 meetup last night, I was able to attend Shawn Lauriat’s presentation How Learning American Sign Language (ASL) Improved My Alt Text.

Before Lauriat began his presentation, he introduced himself as one of the co-organizers for the A11y NYC meetup group and spoke about his job at Google, working on accessibility for Google Docs and Drive (sounds cool to me!).

I smiled and nodded my head when he said:

I’m not deaf.

I’m not a user of alt text.

I’m not a linguist, philologist, artist, photographer, writer, or audio describer.

I just like making things accessible to everyone.

That’s exactly what I like to do! I knew I was going to enjoy his talk.

It was great to see several accessibility folks I chat with on Twitter also watched/listened to the livestream, including Tara Robertson, Adrian Roselli, and Jennison Asuncion.

Here are my notes from the presentation.

How Learning Sign Language Improved my Alt Text

What Does Alt Text Do?

Alt text stands for alternative text in HTML. It’s the text that displays when images don’t appear on a web page or application.

For screen readers, the alt text displays instead of the image.

If you don’t use a screen reader, you might encounter alt text when you disable images in Gmail (or another email application) on your smartphone.

Alt text displays in place of the image.

Alt text tends to be concise, it doesn’t go deep into details of an image.

ASL Visual Description

ASL has three main components for visual description:

1. Start big and set the stage.
   You need to provide context. Lauriat described giving directions of where he lived in Manhattan.
2. Provide details, selectively.
   For example, if you’re describing a painting, include information about the style. Is it Jackson Pollack style or pointillism?
3. Include an interpretation, if you think it will add value.

Don’t forget, keep it concise.

Visual Description for People Who Are Blind

Lauriat adapted the recommendations from Art Beyond Sight’s Guidelines for Verbal Description and streamlined them.

His four steps for visual description for images:

1. Start big, set the stage.
   Provide context, include time and location. Is the setting inside or outside? What is the environment (sunny, nighttime)?
   Provide perspective (perhaps you’re looking down on a concert stage).
2. Offer vivid, selective detail, but avoid distractions.
3. Include interpretation, analogies.
   What emotion do you want to evoke? This is where your writing skills can shine!
4. Break the rules for effect. (It may not always work, but give it a whirl!)

Lauriat provided examples of visual descriptions for photos he’s taken.

I was surprised at the detail he included in the visual descriptions, providing more context than I normally would include.

Again, he reminded everyone to keep descriptions concise! Long-winded descriptions can quickly turn off someone who is listening.

Summary

By providing context, setting the scene, and offering analogies, visual descriptions for images improves your alt text.

Listening and reading Lauriat’s visual descriptions brought the image alive for me, making me feel I was there in the room, outside near the water, as his descriptions provided a more complete picture (yes, pun intended!).

I have to admit, I have more work to do with my visual descriptions of images.

Two other things I learned from the presentation:

1. Twitter (and now Facebook, as of spring 2018) are the only social media applications that provide the ability to add alternative text for images
2. Twitter’s alt text has a limit of 1,000 characters, there is a lot of room for you to provide a more complete description

Lauriat graciously provided his presentation in Google Slides format.

If you like, you can watch the livestream. The video is one hour long, but his presentation lasted just under 30 minutes. Q & A lasted a bit longer.