Everyone, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm super excited that we have Anne with us. She is amazing and I'm super excited to have her share all this wonderful information about using alt text with Wixie.
So I will pass it off to her. Thanks again, Anne. Thank you, Tiffany.
Yes, I'm Anne Truger. I'm at A. Truger on the socials, specifically Twitter and BlueSky are where you'll find any of my educational content. I have been a TIE since the very beginning, a Tech for Learning Innovative Educator.
Pretty much, I believe it was like 2007. It might have been a little earlier than that. But I'm really excited to still be a part of Wixie and Tech for Learning after all those years.
I have 20 plus years in special education. I have 25 plus years in presenting at conferences. I'm a digital learning specialist currently at a special education cooperative in Highland Park, Illinois, and I am a certifiable Disney freak.
However, today I'm here to talk to you about alt text and how easy Wixie has made it for you to add alt text. So I'm going to go ahead and go to my next slide here. I just want to make sure because I don't use meet a lot, that it went to the next slide and it did.
Excellent. Fantastic. So alt text, what is alt text? Alt text is alternative text.
Sometimes it's called alt attributes, alt descriptions. But what it is, it's a snippet of text that describes the contents of an image. And then these descriptions can be read aloud by screen readers.
So there are a lot of reasons to include alt text, but the biggest reason is for accessibility. So it's really important that you always have alt text whenever something is going to be online. And when you're creating in Wixie, you're creating online.
It may not be shared publicly, but if it is, you want to make sure that there's some alt text. So I have this decision tree about when you want to use alt text. Okay.
And so the first question is just, have you included an image? So if you didn't include an image, then you don't need to have alt text. However, if you do include an image, you do want to have alt text. Then you want to know what is the purpose of the image.
Okay. Every time you have an image, sometimes it's just for decoration, but sometimes it's a purpose. And so if it is a purpose, if it's to provide content, if it's to give information, then you want to include alt text.
If it's just a decoration and there's not really any information that's being shared by the image, then you don't have to include alt text. Now, when you include alt text, alt text can look a lot of different ways. It can be a very short snippet.
It can be a very long and involved description. When I'm talking about the legal reasons for alt text, I want to just point out this website down below here. This is the WCAG.
This is all about web accessibility. And this decision tree was based on that. Now, notice when I hover over my decision tree, I get a little box that pops up right here.
The box that's popping up, that's my alt text. And it says a black and gray flowchart showing when to use alt text and when you don't have to use alt text. And this is very, very easy to add into anything you create in Wixie.
Now, Wixie is important to add alt text, as I said, because it's online. But you would also add alt text if you were doing this in a Google slide presentation. If you were using Twitter, if you were using Facebook, anywhere that you're adding images into a website, we want you to think about alt text.
Now, there are laws going into effect that started the most recent law that was passed was in April of last year. And that is that all school districts will have to be in compliance, that all of their images will have to be accessible, meaning that there's alt text included. And I believe you have like two years to get into compliance.
So, it's a really good, it's an important thing that you should be considering any time you're adding image to any kind of a presentation that may be shared on the web. Here are a few things to consider when creating your alt text. First of all, how would you describe this image to someone who can't see it? Think about somebody who's blind.
Think about somebody who has visual impairments. How would you describe this image? If I look at my image up in this right hand corner, I want to think about how I could describe it to you. So, I may say it is a head with a brain and the brain has gears.
Okay. Does that give you the picture of what I'm talking about? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe your image would be a little bit different.
In this case, if I hover over, it says a black and white clip art depicting a human brain while thinking. And maybe you think of what I have pictured here. Maybe you don't.
You get better at writing alt text when you kind of remember who your audience is. Okay. The other thing to keep in mind is that when a screen reader, which is what is going to read all of this alt text to someone who needs it read aloud, a screen reader is going to say the word image of.
So, you never want to say image of. However, you do want to identify what kind of image it is. Is it a photo? Is it a drawing? Is it a graphic? What is the purpose of the image? So, if you have like a website and it has like a picture of a weather chart on it, if the picture of the weather chart is just to say, hey, we're talking about weather, it may not need anything except for image of, which comes from the screen reader, clip art showing a weather chart.
However, if you want that person to also know the temperature, then you may have to write out a lot more information. And that would be a complex alt text. Alt text is not the same as a photo caption.
Alt text has to tell the story to someone who can't see. Also consider if you ever see a website where there's an image that's broken, it will also be able to tell you that. It'll be able to show you the name of that image.
So, I want to go to this page here. Both of these images are a pair of crocs. Two very different images, but have the exact same alt text.
So, we need to fix this. So, I'm going to go into edit mode and I'm going to click on one picture and I'm going to go to edit, edit alt text. Now, a lot of times there'll already be some alt text and you may have to redefine it.
So, I'm going to redefine this by saying two pairs of croc shoes. One is purple and one is green. Now, I don't have to put that much information.
I could have stopped at two pairs of croc shoes, but I wanted to give a little bit more information. One is purple, one is green. If I was trying to sell crocs, I would want that information in there.
And now when I click okay and hover, my image, my alt text is right there. I also want to point out that even though I am not very musically inclined, there are some other ways that you can use alt text, some very creative ways to use alt text. And it is included here in this presentation that you can actually set up some basic tone coding that goes along with being able to play music using Wixie.
If you go to the help file here, you can kind of see this in action. I want to share this tab so you can see it. And so, this one has alt text is helping to actually play music.
And it's the only thing I can play. And I didn't do a great job of it, but I do want to point out that all of the directions on how to use the alt text for this type of thing is included on this very last page. So, if you have any questions about alt text, I'm happy to answer them.
I want to point out that it really depends every time somebody says, do I need alt text for this? It really always depends. And you should always go back to the decision tree to help you make those decisions. So, thank you very much for your time.
And that was my take 10. Awesome. Thank you so much, Anne.
I appreciate it.
