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

Peter, do you have any sort of metrics around the number of requests you received compared with the number of PDFs there are? We have been recommending that our clients adopt a similar approach, but they are always worried that they might be inundated with more requests than they can handle. I rather suspect it would be the opposite, but it would be great to see some figures.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


From: Peter Shikli <pshikli@bizware.com>
Sent: 20 September 2019 17:06
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: 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<http://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