#5: Screen readers can't read pictures

From Emma:

This one turned out to be a lot harder than I thought it would be, in part because it involved checking into more places than I realized I would need to look at. I started by making a list of online platforms that my library (Dallas Public Library) uses that might have images on them. First there is the library website itself, which is actually managed by three different entities with different web practices:

The main website, which is part of the City of Dallas website and managed by the City’s Computer and Information Services department
The public access catalog, which is an Innovative Interfaces product and runs on a platform that they designed and manage
The events calendar and room reservation service, which are Library Market products and run on a platform that they design and manage

On top of that, the library also disseminates information on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest and Youtube.

If I were part of the team that manages the system’s social media use or part of the team that chooses our vendors, I can see that part of my responsibility would be to advocate for choices that prioritize accessibility features, alt text included. However, I just work at a branch, so I have access to exactly three of all these platforms: the Library Market calendar, Facebook and Nextdoor. I decided to look into how these sites handle alt text.

Facebook makes it pretty easy by automatically generating alt text for your images, but you can customize it to your own text by following the steps on this help page.

Nextdoor was…not like that. I searched their help pages for “alt text” and “accessibility” and didn’t get any results, so I used WebAim’s WAVE tool to evaluate one of the pages to see if alt text was present for the images Nextdoor itself had uploaded, and it found that a bunch of them were missing. I decided I’d contact the company and ask them what the situation was, but you can’t even do that without creating a Nextdoor account. So I’ve flagged that as something to investigate more later. For now I’ll make a note to assume that any images posted are completely unusable by people using screen readers, and accordingly that anything I post should have equivalent information posted as text at the same time.

I also checked a few postings for library events on the event calendar pages managed by Library Market, and found missing alt text there as well. However, that was on something posted by library staff—the images that were part of the Library Market site design did have alt text, so at least I know it’s possible. I did a search to see if I could find instructions on how to add alt text and didn’t find any help on their public website, but it’s possible that it’s available to users when they are logged in. I had to set this one aside for further research during work time, since I obviously don’t do the blog at work.

This was kind of a discouraging tip to implement, since I found out that only one of my three marketing channels was in a good place as far as alt text. However, even if I’m not able to get alt text on the other two channels, at least now I’m aware of that shortcoming and I can be extra conscious in my postings to make sure that the information is conveyed in another way that is accessible to people using screen readers.