Chapter 3 – Microsoft Word,
Alternative Text
14:20 mins
13.06.2012
Transcribed from video:
[Screenshot of Daniel Hubbell’s desktop]
Daniel:
So I’m going to open up a Microsoft Word document. We’re going to
talk about Alt Texts or images.
[Presenter clicks on Start – Microsoft Word 2010]
Now I asked this in the first group, and there was a pretty good
response – how many of you folks know what Alt Text is? Awesome.
Good. There probably would have been five hands that didn’t go up.
Either I’ve put you to sleep already, or briefly I will say that Alt Text
as I mentioned is a verbal description, or a text description of
something that you would see in a photograph. So there’s a few
different things that people think about, and I want to draw a
distinction between Alt Text and captions, because a lot of times you’ll
have an image in a document, and you’ll have a caption underneath it,
right, so kind of like figure one, or picture one, or caption one, and
you’ll have a caption underneath a piece of artwork, or a description
underneath a figure to explain what it is.
To me – and this is not gospel, this is my personal approach to this –
but the difference between Alt Text to me and captions, are Alt Text
describes what you see, and a caption describes the story about what’s
happening. A real world example of this – if you think of a photograph
in a newspaper, there’s a car accident on the side of a highway and a
photograph; the Alt Text could essentially say “photograph of a car
through a broken guardrail, laying on its side,” and it’s describing what
you see. You see a car flipped on its side, that’s broken through a
guardrail. The caption for that might be, “state senator was speeding
down the highway, was over the legal drinking limit, careened off the
side of the road and broke through the guardrail.” So that’s your
caption on the story, it’s what happened, whereas the Alt Text is
actually describing what you see. And both are important, the captions
specifically describe outside of the metadata of the photograph, which
we’re going to talk about.
Now, so I’m going to insert a photograph.
[Presenter clicks on Insert – picture – then selects a photo from a file]
And I’m going to use the photograph I used earlier today. Actually
we’ll use a different one, because this is cuter. So this is my son
waiting for his first day of kindergarten, and he is waiting by the door,
ready to go, so the Alt Text for this – and by default we add this
photograph, and there’s no associated data with this image, the screen
where we put this says “I don’t understand”.
[Presenter right clicks on the image and then clicks on format picture]
www.transcriberonline.com
1
Chapter 3 – Microsoft Word,
Alternative Text
14:20 mins
13.06.2012
So if I right click on this image, and I click on format picture – now
I’m using Office 2010, and it is good to note that if you’re using
previous versions of Office, and in particular Office 2003, the tab for
this is not format picture, but I think it’s picture size, or size, and select
that option. So just note that there are few of these tabs and nuances
like that.
In this case I click on format picture, and there’s a tab at the bottom
that says Alt Text.
[Presenter moves the mouse to the Alt Text tab at the bottom of the
box]
In older versions of Office the tab may be across the top, so in Office
2003 it puts up a side menu, the alt tab is across the top and not on the
side, but it’s still labelled Alt Text.
[Presenter clicks on the Alt Text tab, and indicates the two fields with
the mouse]
Now there are two fields, when I click on Alt Text there’s one for the
title, and one for the description, and it’s good to put information in
both of these fields. When you export a document and you go into
Microsoft, or go into HTML and maybe you create a PDF, different
things happen, and sometimes one of them is extracted, sometimes both
of them are merged together, and different screen readers interpret
these fields differently, in a different way, so it’s important to include
both of them. So I’m going to put a title.
[Presenter enters data into the title field]
I’m going to say ‘Student standing with lunchbox,’ and for the
description I will say, ‘Student standing by the door waiting for the bus
with a lunchbox.’ So in the description I’ve added a little bit more text
– if it ever shows up. I’ve added a little bit more information in the
description, using the Copy and Paste and made the title and
description exactly the same. That’s really an editorial decision on
behalf of you or the folks that you work with, in saying what
information you want to add in there. But the important thing is to put
something there.
[Presenter clicks on close]
So once I’ve done that that Alt Text is now associated with the
photograph, and if it’s exported, whether that be HTML or just PDF,
that information is going to be included with it. And if I wanted to add
a caption, which is commonly done for the context of a document, I
could add that here.
www.transcriberonline.com
2
Chapter 3 – Microsoft Word,
Alternative Text
14:20 mins
13.06.2012
[Presenter adds a caption below the photograph - Picture 1: Student
standing by the door waiting for the bus]
‘Picture one, student standing by the door waiting for the bus.’ So I
can put that in there, so that you have the benefit of both having the
caption within your document, as well as associated with the
photograph. So, any questions on Alt Text? This is a very simple
thing, but complex, and I normally have a lot of questions. There
already are. I’ll start over here first.
[Question being asked from the audience]
So the question is what happens if you have to do a description in a
chart, which is a very good question.
[Presenter sighs]
You know from an editorial perspective, obviously you have to think
about what information is that chart trying to communicate, and if you
have a graph for example of two activities, a graph and a line graph,
you could say describe that, this is a chart, can carry a number of tasks,
the number of people within a task, and that gives a description of what
that chart is. If it’s an image you would want to, if it’s an actual chart
in Word, you will be able to use a Premier to actually interpret the data
from that. If it’s an image you will need to provide another way of
structuring what those data points are in that graph, because there’s no
way to understand in an image that there’s actually data points, but if
it’s an actual chart you’ll have data points, associated with it, and the
screen reader would get it. Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Sure. So the question is if you’re exporting to a PDF how do you know
that the alternate text is going to be there when you do the export.
And the simplest thing to know is when you Save As, and if I were to
select a PDF in the Save As dialogue here, in the options for this I can
choose Document structure tags for accessibility in a checkmark here,
and this is going to be the command within Word that’s going to make
sure that all those tags get exported.
[Presenter clicks on file – save as – PDF – options – and then points the
mouse to Document structure tags for accessibility]
So if they’re not making it across, the first thing to check is that this
checkbox is turned on, because the flag that tells it do to that work.
So there was a question down here?
[Question being asked from the audience]
www.transcriberonline.com
3
Chapter 3 – Microsoft Word,
Alternative Text
14:20 mins
13.06.2012
Yeah. The question is if you have a chart and you want to include the
data in text form so that it can be accessed, are you better to add that
into the Alt Text field or into the content itself. And I would say that
you could do it any number of ways. My personal opinion on the
matter is if be as descriptive, get as precise as possible within the Alt
Text, and if there is really, truly important information that a chart is
trying to convey, to also find a way of doing that textually either before
or after the chart. And that way that is not just for the benefit of
someone who might be using it in assisted technology, but it could
benefit anybody who might be reading the document, they’ll find it
easier to just read data, versus trying to interpret a chart.
Yes?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yes, there is. This is facilitated by assisted technology.
[Question being asked from the audience]
It can be, and it really comes down to usability and what you’re trying
to do. Some people will opt to only reveal certain fields in Alt Text, so
it would be repetitive. It really becomes a style thing, so it’s probably
not the best thing to repeat everything, but it does qualify as being
accessible, because information is there. And we’ll talk a lot during the
course of some of these other best practices that just because you’ve
put something in there doesn’t mean that the quality of it is very good
from an editorial perspective. It can be accessible, but not very
useable, and those are two very different things. So while it is possible
to duplicate everything, and we say probably not a good idea, but there
are some contexts in which that might be OK.
Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yes. And to just summarise, for those that probably couldn’t hear
down the back, the first bit, that if you have the opportunity to
familiarise yourself with some of the tools that we’ve mentioned,
things like screen readers, there are a number of free ones that you can
download online, go and try them, because they are a great way to
understand how the data that you’re creating is being consumed. So
it’s an additional piece. And as well from a usability standpoint, if you
have the opportunity to work with customers through usability studies,
to make sure that you include people’s disabilities in those studies,
because they can typically give you good feedback on how they might
be using it, which can sometimes be different than the way we
expected it to be used. Did I summarise that well? Great. Oh, yes Sir?
www.transcriberonline.com
4
Chapter 3 – Microsoft Word,
Alternative Text
14:20 mins
13.06.2012
[Question being asked from the audience]
Yeah, I’m going to talk about the accessibility checker after the break,
so I’m going to go through all of these, and then I’ll go through the
accessibility checker, but basically it does check that.
[Question being asked from the audience]
Oh, the spell check? This came up in the last session as well. In the
data field for inputting the Alt Text, the spell checker and the grammar
checker do not work, and one of the workarounds that we talked about
was actually typing it in the document, making sure that it’s spelt
correctly, and the grammar is correct, and then copy and pasting it into
your Alt Text. Good question, thank you. Yes, Sir?
[Question being asked from the audience]
It should render text, which is why you’ll see a caption preceded with
figure one, diagram one, photograph one, that’s typically how the
number places for captioning graphics and charts.
www.transcriberonline.com
5