Simply How Lengthy Will have to Alt Textual content Be? | CSS-Methods

I educate a category over on the native school right here in Lengthy Seaside and a majority of the content material is hosted at the Canvas LMS so scholars can get right of entry to it on-line. And, naturally, I need the content material to be as available as imaginable, so thank goodness Canvas has a11y tooling constructed proper into it.

Nevertheless it ain’t all that rosy. It makes assumptions like every different a11y tooling and adheres to pointers that had been programmed into it. It’s now not just like the WCAG is baked proper in and up to date when it updates.

The rationale that is even on my thoughts is that Jeremy the day prior to this described his love for writing symbol descriptions:

I revel in writing alt textual content. I latterly described how I up to date my posting interface right here alone web page to place a textarea for alt textual content entrance and centre for my notes with pictures. Since then I’ve been taking part in the inventive problem of writing helpful—but additionally evocative—alt textual content.

I purchase into that! Writing alt textual content is a problem that calls for a gentle dance between the technical and the inventive. It’s each a chance to make content material extra available and support the consumer revel in.

A kind of programmed pointers within the Canvas software is a cap of 120 characters on alt textual content. Why 120? I dunno, I couldn’t to find any supporting tenet or rule for that particular quantity. One solution is that display readers prevent pronouncing textual content after 125 characters, however that’s it appears unfaithful, a minimum of nowadays. The overall recommendation for a way lengthy alt textual content must be is available in various levels:

• Jake Archibald talks of period on the subject of emotion. Element is superb, however an excessive amount of element may distort the focus, which makes general sense.
• Dave sees them as brief, succinct paragraphs.
• Carrie Fisher suggests a 150-character prohibit now not as a result of display readers will truncate them however extra as a psychological notice that possibly issues are getting too descriptive.
• Daniel Göransson says in this 2017 information that it comes right down to context and understanding when positive main points of a picture are value further clarification. However he normally errs at the facet of conciseness.

So, how lengthy must alt textual content be? The overall consensus here’s that there’s no exhausting prohibit, however extra of a contextual consciousness of what function the picture serves and adapting to it accordingly.

Which will get me again to Jeremy’s article. He used to be writing alt textual content for a bunch of speaker headshots and learned the textual content used to be all beginning to sound the similar. He paused, idea in regards to the revel in, when put next it to the revel in of a sighted consumer, and created parity between them:

The extra audio system had been added to the line-up, the extra I felt like I used to be repeating myself with the alt textual content. […] The revel in of a sighted individual taking a look at a web page stuffed with audio system is that when some time the photographs more or less mix in combination. So if the alt textual content additionally begins to sound just a little repetitive after some time, possibly that’s now not the sort of unhealthy factor. A display reader consumer could be getting an an identical revel in.

I dig that. So in the event you’re on the lookout for a troublesome and rapid rule on persona counts, sorry to disappoint. Like such a lot of different issues, context is king and that’s one of these factor that may’t be codified, and even automatic for that topic.

And whilst we’re at the matter, simply spotted that Twitter has UI to show alt textual content: