This is for everyone
Tim Berners-Lee
As a content author myself – I am, actually writing this, with fingers – I know it can be hard to choose how to provide alternative text for non-text content.
Do you go full-on and launch into a full description of the image? Or is just a brief alt=”cat” sufficient?
So, how would you choose to describe this image to someone who can’t see it?
I gave it a <caption>Tree blossom</caption>, and alt=”Delicate white tree blossom against a clear blue Spring sky”.
Is that perfect? Probably not.
I don’t pretend to understand the lived experience of people whose experience is not like mine.
Then I stumbled across this article on the w3c website.
And I thought, “this looks handy“.
And it is.
But I thought it could be handier.
So, first of all I walked through this in Miro. More a logic flow than anything.
My ambition was to code something on codepen (or glitch, heroku, whatevs) by the end of the week.
Long story short: I tried using the XGovFormBuilder heroku app but it kinda … well, just forgot everything I had tried the next day.
So. Resorted to my old pal Codepen. Good ol’ HTML, CSS and javascript. Then I later refactored it to run on this blog.
I'm a service designer in Scottish Enterprise's unsurprisingly-named service design team. I've been a content designer, editor, UX designer and giant haystacks developer on the web for (gulp) over 25 years.