Accessible PDF – Leader in Offshore Accessibility Testing | Section 508 Compliance | WCAG Conformance | BarrierBreak

Image Description – An Integral part of Content Accessibility

Ramya Venkitesh — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 05:14:54 +0000

Image Descriptions are key to providing equal access to people who are low vision or blind the same information from an accessibility perspective. Often referred to as image descriptions or alternate text or alt text, let's discuss how you can ensure accessibility for images.

Images are an integral part of telling the story on the web, in books, in content in general, but how do we make images accessible. They say 80% of our learning comes from seeing, but what if you are unable to see the images. For visually impaired users, they might be unable to see the image and understand what the image conveys. This obviously creates a challenge from an accessibility perspective.

How do we:

describe images for people with disabilities?
know that the image description can be understood by people with visual impairment?
know that the image descriptions are accurate?

Whether it is a website, a textbook or a brochure, visual designers and content creators use images as a way to visually communicate with the audiences. Images are used to break the monotony of the text, images are used to depict the information differently.

The challenge ahead of us is making images accessible by ensuring that we add image descriptions that are effective for people with disabilities. Image descriptions are often referred to as alt text by some. We might decide whether an image is informative, in which we need to provide an image description or an alt text, if the image is decorative, we need to see how to skip that for our visually impaired users.

Basic Concepts of Image Description

Image descriptions that people with visual impairment can understand.

Image descriptions that convey the message.

Image descriptions that are concise by clear in what they are communicating.

Image descriptions that are accurate.

Often Image Descriptions are not given enough of an importance. Imagine studying for your science exam and not being able to understand what the image depicting the Movement of Molecules in and out of cells or not being able to understand a graph with the rice production per year across different countries.

Images are critical to the learning. Different users learn differently. Numerous users are visual today. Images can help us overcome these challenges but we also need to ensure to take everyone along with us. We can't leave the visually impaired behind. We need to provide them access to images by providing image descriptions that support them in understanding what you and I have access to. It is about equal access to images, yes I said, equal access to images which are in the textbook, on the web or in a brochure telling me about a holiday destination.

At BarrierBreak, our image description services includes writing image descriptions for images but also testing it with people with disabilities. You might say, what a time-consuming effort! But if you are looking to implement image descriptions effectively and just want to talk, no string attached, then reach out to us at sales@barrierbreak.com or call us +91-22-26860485.

The post Image Description – An Integral part of Content Accessibility appeared first on Leader in Offshore Accessibility Testing | Section 508 Compliance | WCAG Conformance | BarrierBreak.

As a student with visual impairment, how to navigate an Accessible PDF textbook?

admin_barrierbreak — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 03:03:52 +0000

Portable Document Format (PDF) is the preferred file format to publish, share and carry information online which has minimum memory size. In today’s time most important is making the document readable by assistive technology. From technical point of view, it is essential that the content is comprehensible to all user groups.

As a screen reader user, when I was a student we had completed our studies with the help of braille and audio books. Digital products such as mobile, laptop etc. were not available till some time back. Now a days, schools, colleges, universities, eBook publishers etc are providing books in PDF format to their readers. Students with visual impairment, too prefer study material in an accessible PDF format which enables easy access to information.

For students with visual impairment who are using screen reader, let us know more about accessible PDF and how to navigate within.

PDF reader

Acrobat reader DC is the preferred application to access the PDF documents and it has lots of in-built accessibility features. It is available for different platforms such as Android, iOS, Mac, Windows etc. Check to know how to use Acrobat Reader on Windows:

Navigation

Here is the list of quick navigation keys available to help navigate within the document :

If you are aware about page content or after reading the table of content, you can jump directly to specific page with the help of Control+Shift+N
Control + F to find the content within the book.
You can jump directly to table by help of T and shift + T to previous table.

Headings

Headings are used in the accessible textbook to understand the content structure of the book. Assistive technology, such as screen reader users can navigate the accessible textbook using any of options given below:

You can jump headings by headings within the textbook with the help of H for next and shift + H to previous heading.
Press down arrow to access the content below heading.
Press insert plus F6” to open the dialog box of headings when using jaws and press insert plus F7” to pool up the list with NVDA.

List

Similar to headings, you can access the lists in your accessible PDF using the shortcut key L or read through the content using the Up or Down arrow keys.

Table

An accessible PDF helps interpret the table and provides students with visual impairment with lots of option to access the tabular content. Students can use different keyboard commands to jump to a table, read one cell at a time, listen to the table headers, read entire row, read entire column and even jump to a cell.

Tip: You can get additional information about jaws screen reader shortcut keys on freedom scientific and nvaccess for NVDA.

Accessible PDF textbooks or learning materials have truly enhanced the reading experience for students using a screen reader or a student with visual impairment.

Need help with making your PDF accessible? Write to us at sales@barrierbreak.com.

The post As a student with visual impairment, how to navigate an Accessible PDF textbook? appeared first on Leader in Offshore Accessibility Testing | Section 508 Compliance | WCAG Conformance | BarrierBreak.

Business Case for Publishers on how Accessibility can give you an edge in selling your product.

Shilpi Kapoor — Thu, 04 May 2017 05:50:50 +0000

Accessibility has often been the last thing on organizations minds when they develop their products and services! But this is surely changing! We have seen the impact that Section 508 has impacted procurement in the US. Today, we are seeing it providing an edge not only at the Federal or Central level but at the states too!

Let’s take the business case for Publishers and how accessibility can assist them in differentiating their product! Texas Education Agency (TEA) in the Proclamation 2017 issued a notice to both publishers and the public that the State Board of Education (SBOE) is inviting bids to furnish new instructional materials for a list of courses.

This document refers to accessibility in multiple places and for different types of deliverables and not just restricted to books. It also now includes electronic instructional material such as CD-ROMs, DVDs or web-based instructional materials.

It clearly states that for:

Printed Instructional material – one copy of the material should be delivered as a Nimas file for Braille, Large Print & Audio Production
Instructional material delivered Electronically – A third party audit report of conformance to Web Content Accessibility Guideline 2.0 – Level AA standards. It even identifies the minimum audit that needs to be conducted for home page, randomly selected pages with different types of elements like tables, forms, images. Though the publisher can determine the number of pages to be included.

It is impressive that more and more procurement guidelines are not just expecting the web accessibility standards but also refer to standards for MathML, Image Description Guidelines.

As businesses, we can’t ignore accessibility any longer. I think the publishing industry is seeing this. Its time for the rest of the industries to adopt accessibility rather than lose business to competition who is adopting it.

Let’s get proactive and not reactive about Accessibility. If you need to discuss your organizations accessibility strategy, do reach out to us!

The post Business Case for Publishers on how Accessibility can give you an edge in selling your product. appeared first on Leader in Offshore Accessibility Testing | Section 508 Compliance | WCAG Conformance | BarrierBreak.