Alternative text for images

At work, I've been doing a lot of work to ensure that people with screen readers can access everything we produce. Like I said the other day, it's not a binary state. You can't say it is fully accessible or fully inaccessible. Like with many things, we can all do our bit. Start somewhere. Don't do nothing, just because you don't know everything.

What can I do?

1. Whenever you post an image of any kind online, always give it a text description. Usually there is a specific place to add this, called 'Alt text' but if it's on social media, you could just add it into your post. The only time you probably don't need to do this, is if you are sure that only a known number of people will access it, and they can all see. For me, I know that all my Facebook friends can see, so I don't tend to do it. However, on Twitter, I have followers who are blind. It wouldn't be very friendly to post stuff that they can't enjoy, would it?

2. Ah, that's for another post!

Challenge

Post a photo and write a text description of it, that a blind person could use to imagine your image. I wonder how many people will do this!