Questions
Alt text for images and ads
We got a question from a potential advertiser who works with visually impaired individuals asking if the ad she purchased would readable with a screen reader. I didn't see a way to include alt text in the settings in the ad rotator for a regular image ad so I figured I'd better put in a feature request. I could probably do it by creating an HTML ad and putting a simple img src + alt in there, but that is kind of clunky; a simple field would be great.
All new and existing software and workflows are being examined for 508/504 compliance so we will need this functionality.
Answer
On a related topic ... Is there a way in Blox to apply alt tags to photo assets? I see you can add a caption but could not find an alt tag field.
By the way, did anyone see the stories about how many businesses are being hit with ADA lawsuits because their websites are not accessible to the blind? This includes New York art galleries:
Correct... images for content blocks are automatically "alt"ed.
Ads have an alt text that just says, "Advertisement" or something along those lines. We would have to create a new field for the alt text for BLOX Ad Manager assets, so that would require a bit of additional development. I would recommend looking at Google Ad Manager instead, which does have an alt text feature for image ads.
Any block type that is specifically image-related, such as Utility: Image or Utility: Site Logo (as Ian noted), has an alt text field for that image.
We will need this functionality built in to TN. We are trying to get ahead with fixes because accessibility is being taken very seriously by our administration and all software (local, cloud, web) is being examined for front- and back-end accessibility compliance. We're having to change our e-newsletter provider (one of the largest out there; we've used it for nearly 10 years) because it doesn't meet standards.
There's an alt text field with banner ads, but that's the only place I've seen it.
We actually have an editor who is visually impaired who brings this stuff up a lot. Didn't know about those ADA lawsuits though, holy crap.
I don't see an alt text field when creating an ad - can anyone point me in that direction?
Running our site through the WAVE accessibility checker, TownNews does automatically add alt text to each image, but -- on our site, at least -- it seems to use the title of the article as the alt text for each image, regardless of whether the image has a caption underneath. It would be ideal if there was a field for alt text that was prepopulated with the image caption, with the ability to edit it to add further description.
Oh dang, sorry about that I was totally wrong. I was thinking of the Utility: Image file block. That's the only place I've seen it that I can recall.
" it seems to use the title of the article as the alt text for each image, regardless of whether the image has a caption underneath"
I could see that actually being a really bad thing, as I believe those accessibility checkers ding points for things that have to get read/repeated unnecessarily. Imagine using a reader on a page and it randomly blurts the headline again all throughout the article, for every photo.
We had taken advantage of the alt-tag field in our old WordPress system primarily as an SEO tool rule. Now, apparently, there might legal reasons to do it. I'm assuming captions are visible to accessibility checkers, right?
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Correct... images for content blocks are automatically "alt"ed.
Ads have an alt text that just says, "Advertisement" or something along those lines. We would have to create a new field for the alt text for BLOX Ad Manager assets, so that would require a bit of additional development. I would recommend looking at Google Ad Manager instead, which does have an alt text feature for image ads.
Any block type that is specifically image-related, such as Utility: Image or Utility: Site Logo (as Ian noted), has an alt text field for that image.