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01 Introduction: We are living in the post-text era
In America alone, over 7 million people have some form of visual Impairment*, and the number is growing.
* Prevent Blindness. “Prevalence of Visual Acuity Loss or Blindness in the US.” Prevent Blindness, https://preventblindness.org/prevalence-visual-acuity-loss-blindness-us/.
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The first web page, designed by Tom Berners-Lee in 1993, consisted entirely of text*.
* Edwards, Benj. “The First Website: How the Web Looked 30 Years Ago.” How-To Geek, 2021, https://www.howtogeek.com/744795/the-first-website-how-the-web-looked-30-years-ago/.
But after three decades, the internet and social media platforms have become predominantly image-based.
We are living in the post-text era.
How do blind and visually impaired (BLV) users read digital images? First, turn on the screen reader on your device to enable audio feedback.
Then glide your finger across the screen, then the screen reader will read the element that you are on.
What happens when you tap an image? If you tap the image, the screen reader will announce the alt text added to the image.
Alternative text, commonly referred to as alt text, is a brief text description that explains what the image depicts and why it is relevant to the surrounding content*. When you upload an image on the web, you are expected to add an alt text to the image for screen reader users.
* Microsoft. “Everything You Need to Know to Write Effective Alt Text.” Microsoft Support, 2021, https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/everything-you-need-to-know-to-write-effective-alt-textdf98f884-ca3d-456c-807b-1a1fa82f5dc2.
Carnegie Mellon research showed that 99.9 percent of tweets with images do not include alt text*. What if there is no alt text added to an image? This problem is what BLV users will confront. Screen readers can detect that the image is there, but they have no idea what’s in it.
* Bigham, Jeffrey P., et al. “Twitter’s Image-Cropping Algorithm Does Not Crop Out Bias.” Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pubs/pdfs/2019/twitter-alt-text.pdf.
Introduction Subject Matter Experts
To guide my thesis, I consulted three groups: end-users of assistive technology, creators of the technology, and educators who facilitate communication between BLV and sighted communities.
