Re: Tutorial Feedback

Hello Bill,

Thanks for your feedback. Indeed “images of text” is not what 
applies to your image in question.

It’s [defined](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#dfn-images-of-text) as 
“text that has been rendered in a non-text form (e.g., an image) in 
order to achieve a particular visual effect” – And “This does not 
include text that is part of a picture that contains significant other 
visual content.”

Images of text means images that consists mostly or only to convey the 
text in the image. Your illustration/screenshot has a different use 
case.

I’ll make sure to find more precise wording for the upcoming minor 
revision of the tutorials.

Thanks for your feedback, it is extremely valuable to improve our 
resource.

[For context: The tutorials do not specify the rules (that we call 
guidelines), those are defined in the [Web Content Accessibility 
Guidelines (WCAG)](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21). The tutorial are just 
practical guidance for implementing WCAG.]

👋 Eric

On 1 Feb 2020, at 20:14, Hammerschlag, Bill wrote:

> 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





--

Eric Eggert
Web Accessibility Specialist
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)