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

We wrestled with the idea when working with government agencies faced 
with huge volumes of archival PDFs.  We remediated what we could with 
the budget available, but what to do with the rest.  One option was to 
comply to the law by simply removing them.  The optics of this didn't 
appeal to us; to deprive sighted users on behalf of the disabled.  Not a 
good move as we try to build public support for the disabled.

Because we already do our work using a cloud-based task management 
system, our solution was to integrate into that.  We wrote code that 
replaced all gazillion unremediated PDFs with a form that gave users two 
options, one was to link to the unremediated old version and another was 
to request remediation.  That request seamlessly entered our task 
management system where we proposed a remediation task and the agency 
accepted, unless of course it was some bogus request from Mickey Mouse, 
or it was a thousand-page monster from 20 years ago, in which case the 
agency chose to remove that PDF instead with a link to its closest 
successor. In most cases, the remediated PDF replaced the request form 
for the requester and all future visitors.

Does this conform to WCAG 2.0 or 2.1, comply to Title II and III of the 
ADA, and protect against lawsuits and such?  Obviously this requires 
judgement calls.  WCAG allows for accessible versions such as a table 
view of the contents of a map, but the assumption is that the alternate 
content is immediately or at least quickly available. Our task-based 
solution tries to respond to this with 2 key requirements:

1) Rapid Response - We streamlined all the steps involved to be the 
fastest possible.

2) Accountability - The task management system produces reports as to 
how well we are doing requirement #1 above.  This is important because 
we must face human nature.  Your email requests for ALT attributes lands 
in someone's in-basket, a busy person with other priorities and perhaps 
no clear requirement to respond.  We've all sent email to info@ only to 
get the robot to tell us how important we are.

The 3 liabilities of this approach are:

a) Without the above 2 requirements, one may conclude that the problem 
is solved with the request forms and begin shifting from remediating to 
just using request forms.  An Accessibility Plan should include request 
forms as a stepping stone to full accessibility where all such forms are 
eventually replaced by remediated content or removed as part of normal 
housekeeping.

b) WCAG allows for a statement of partial compliance, and this should be 
presented as such.

c) This has no bearing going forward.  Using accessibility request forms 
for new content is like constructing a building without wheelchair ramps 
until someone asks for them.

Cheers,
Peter Shikli
Access2online
www.access2online.com
Prison inmates helping the internet become accessible


Lorenzo Milani wrote on 9/17/2019 9:39 AM:
>
> 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
>