Tutorial Feedback

I'm Bill Hammerschlag, a Professor in the Dallas County Community College District.

This is a comment related to the Web Accessibility Tutorials > Images > Images Concepts section, specifically:

Images of text<https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/textual/>: Readable text is sometimes presented within an image. If the image is not a logo, avoid text in images. However, if images of text are used, the text alternative should contain the same words as in the image.

The DCCCD has a major initiative underway to become ADA compliant as we have the Feds on our back. We use BlackBoard as our Learning Management System and it now has a tool that barks at us for various violations, including the one above.

It's causing problems all over the place, and problems for me as well. Hard and fast rules like that are easy to apply but cannot cover all the bases, sometimes there has to be room for judgment.

To wit, I teach a Programming Course. We use a professional tool - Microsoft Visual Studio - for student code development. It's got menus on top of menus, and they are often obscure and hard to find. I have had to write user guides as the vendor documentation is impenetrable to freshmen. Even random YouTube videos don't help.

Often, I have to provide sequences of instructions. Many look like this:  "Find <this item> on the right side of your screen, click on it, get a submenu, then find the <item> at the top, click on it, get another submenu and click on <item>.

Placement of these items on the screen is often non-obvious, and I got messages from students along the lines of "Thanks for trying to help, but I just cannot find <whatever>.

So, figuring that a picture is worth a thousand words, I started including screen captures. Here's an example (shown smaller here than the students see it, ignore any fuzziness):

[cid:4f98edff-747c-464d-952d-843160b98565]

For the alt-text, I simply repeated the instruction above. That's obvious, logical and helpful. It's working. (I understand that those that are very sight impaired struggle with the software anyway, they often need a sighted assistant working the computer for them.  But - not the issue here.)

Regrettably, your rule would have me replace it with long strings of menu items on top of menu items, 95% of which are useless, in the instant case, confusing and unneeded clutter. In other words, reading all the text in the image is sometimes not helpful, it can be  counterproductive. A visually impaired student using a screen reader here will get a headache as they hear a rattling off of item, item, item, item, item. Their head will spin.

It should be obvious that many people teaching any sort of GUI-driven software with User Guides would have a similar issue. And, it's not just those of us with self-generated documentation. Commercial software manuals are chock full of images like this. Some have tried replacing .jpg formats with .pdfs, yet the images are still trapped as non-compliant due to the incomplete alt-text. This affects a lot my peers.

I urge you to change the rule to something that works better in the field. I do not wish to remove the images to gain a passing ADA score, nor do I desire to cheat and label them as decorative.

Regards,
-Bill Hammerschlag