How do you keep alt text and captions consistent and up to date across your website?

I think if you’d like to be a sunny destination for potential customers — if you care about how disabled people engage with you and your brand online — then developing an inclusive social media strategy should be a priority. And what does that mean? It means making sure your content is accessible for people with visual and auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with your digital information.

In my experience, the importance of context needs to be highlighted when writing captions or alt text. We need to consider the placement of multimedia within the frame of articles and pages or medium, platform or website used as well as communicate purpose through alt text and captions.

Alt text and captions are important for web accessibility because they help users who are unable to see images or videos to understand their content and context. This includes people who are blind or have low vision, use text-based browsers, or have slow internet connections. Alt text can also help people with cognitive disabilities who may find images distracting or overwhelming

It’s really important not just to phone it in with your captions. Take the extra time to ensure that they’re not appearing one word at a time, that the text and background colors are accessible, and that they are genuinely matched to the speaker’s words and cadence. Attention-grabbing is great for your outfit, but not for your captions! Simple and clear is key!

Turning off the sound won't create the same experience as for those who depend on captions. Long-time caption viewers like me will notice anything that strays from general best captioning practices. Besides, when you turn off the sound, you miss out on opportunities to ensure you caption relevant sounds. Also, there may be an off-screen speaker that needs to be identified. It's recommended to use closed captions over open captions because it puts the captions in the viewers' control. They can change the size, font, and other things. How much they can change depends on the platform. Open captions cannot be resized when you change the screen size. Sometimes open captions contain poor captioning style choices that they're not accessible.

You may also test alt text by manually inspecting elements on your browser. This is not ideal for testing multiple images but it's an option for testing specific elements.

Automatic tools are helpful for detecting any missing or repeated alt text. They do not ensure that the alt text is appropriate for a specific image. In the future there may be better and more sophisticated tools in the market.

It's not possible to test captions automatically. In fact, automatic captions need to be reviewed and edited manually because they're rarely 100% accurate.

Content creators/ writers/editors should also be involved in checking the quality and consistency of alt text. Modern CMS tools allow for an efficient collaboration between developers and non developers.

The best people to tell you what works and what doesn't are those with the lived experience. Communicate and gain advice from some of the incredible advocates out there to test your site and your captioning styles. For example alt-text should yes always be literally descriptive but rather than writing 'X is smiling' perhaps try 'X is looking extraordinarily happy and is smiling widely with happiness'. Always check that your captioning and alt-text skills are able to accurately display the messages that you are trying to portray. 'Nothing about us without us' engage those with the knowledge and experience to guide you on your journey.

For captioning, review DCMP's Captioning Key best practices. They're written in plain language and are easy to understand. Feel free to reach out to me as I have more resources.