Requesting Initial Feedback on "Alt-Text on Demand" for Academic Articles

Hello everybody,

I am a Product Associate for the User Experience Team at SAGE Publishing, reaching out for ideas and feedback on an accessibility initiative for academic and scholarly articles found on online journals.

As thousands of journal articles are commissioned and published every year from a variety different sources, it is often very hard to ensure that the authors provide alt-text for any images, tables and graphs they choose to include.

If remediating every image on every article on our platform is not viable or generally useful we still want to provide a solution for delivering fast alternative text. This would be an "alt-text on demand" solution where readers would request alt-text for an article or specific image. We would then add the relevant alt-text and inform the reader when it would be available. The long-term aim is to automate this workflow to deliver the alt-text as quickly as possible, but the text itself would still be created by a human to ensure quality and consistency.

The alt-text request could potentially take different forms:


1.      A mail-to hidden link at the top of an article page, probably next to the skip link

2.      A link to an accessibility page with a simple form to fill out

3.      A simple form on the article page itself

4.      For every image missing meaningful alt text, including alt-text that reads, "to request alt text e-mail exampleaddress@example.com<mailto:exampleaddress@example.com> "

These are just initial ideas and if you have any feedback, insights or comments these would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Lorenzo Milani
Product Associate, User Experience Team
SAGE Publishing
1 & 2, Broadgate
London, EC2M 2QS
UK