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Figures and Captions and Alt-text oh my...

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From: Jonathan Cohn
Date: May 6, 2018 1:39PM

Hello,

I was just reading through the story about Alice's Restaurant that was in The Boston Globe this week. While an interesting story, it was getting very frustrating by the end with VoiceOver on the Macintosh reading essentially the same description for each picture four times.

It would read once for the start of the figure once for the end of the figure, then the alt text and the text below the picture were also read. except for the alt attribute on the graphic itself all the text was exactly the same. So, our wonderful HTML5 standards have caused in at least one screen reader for graphical descriptions to be read four times.

OK, I can figure out how to develop a figure that would not be as verbose though this In fact, if one puts the Macintosh in "Group" web navigation it won't be overly redundant.

But is this issue essentially a Browser / screen reader issue or a design issue. I.E. if figure name = caption name = alt-text should we be requiring our Screen Reader vendors to clean this up, or should the underlying HTML generaed by Newspapers only include alternative text if they are not using figure /figcaption?

Best wishes,

Jonathan Cohn